Whistler In Wapping

Brushfield St 1990 by Philip Marriage Next tickets available for The Gentle Author’s Tour of Spitalfields on Saturday 6th June. Click here to book As a major new exhibition of the work of James McNeill Whistler opens at Tate Britain, we consider the artist’s early work in Wapping William Jones, Limeburner, Wapping High St American-born artist, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, was the first artist to appreciate the utilitarian environment of the East End on its own terms, seeing the beauty in it and recognising the intimate relationship of the working people to the urban landscape they had constructed. He was only twenty-five when he arrived in London from Paris in the summer of 1859 and, rejecting the opportunity of staying with his half-sister in Sloane St, he took up lodgings in Wapping instead. Influenced by Charles Baudelaire to pursue subjects from modern life and seek beauty among the working people of the teeming city, Whistler lived among the longshoremen, dockers, watermen and…