Milkmaids, by Geroge Scharf, Courtesy of Sir John Soane's Museum
Exhibition Preview - George Scharf: From Regency Street to the Modern Metropolis, March 20 – June 6, 2009.
The Sir John Soane’s Museum is to host the first ever exhibition of watercolours by social chronicler of early Victorian London George Scharf, who has been described as the pictorial equivalent of Charles Dickens.
The exhibition is being organised in partnership with the Prints and Drawings Department of the British Museum and will focus Scharf’s passion for sketching London Street life.
His detailed drawings capture every aspect of ordinary life in London in the early nineteenth century with an immediacy that has been described as ‘almost photographic'. He picks up the smallest of details in the pictures such as the buttons on someone’s coat or the boots on their feet.
Scharf studied at the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences in Munich and left in 1810 having become an expert in lithographic printing and trained in miniature portrait painting.
He moved to London after joining the British Army and participating in the battle of Waterloo and spent the rest of his life in the city.
Not only do the pictures offer an interesting insight into London’s 19th century inhabitants, Scharf also precisely recreates the architectural landscape of the city.
His work combines a sensitive observation of the individuals in the pictures with architectural accuracy to give a full picture of the city and its people as he saw it.
Lane near St Martins Church, by Geroge Scharf, Courtesy of Sir John Soane's Museum
In the 1820s and 1830s London experienced a huge growth in what we would now describe as consumer culture and Scharf’s pictures depict the advertising hoardings and shop signs that had started to crop up all around the city.
Society also changed with the introduction of gas lighting, which made the streets safer and meant that London could start to develop a nightlife, which meant the first music halls began to open.
The exhibition also brings to life many of the buildings that Sir John Soane worked on such as the Bank of England or the old Palace of Westminster, now irrevocably lost.
The rapidly changing face of early Victorian London is depicted through 60 works, primarily using material from the British Museum.
Scharf’s widow sold items to the Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings in 1862 and his son George, the first director of the NPG donated further items in 1900.
For more information go to www.soane.org.
