"The Thames"

This picture caught my eye while I was reading an art review. It's just so beautiful!


"The Thames" (1876) by James Tissot

Here's what Holland Cotter had to say about this picture in Friday's New York Times:

It depicts a man with two women of questionable respectability surveying the river from the deck of a boat, equipped with a picnic and Champagne. It is one of the few paintings in the show ["Monet's London: Artists' Reflections on the Thames, 1859-1914" at the Brooklyn Museum until Sept. 4.] that actually situate us on the Thames, at water level. It is also one of the few pictures in which people play a significant role, and fogs and mists almost none.

Here we see, without filters, hard details of an insalubrious city, its water and air colored the same greasy gray-brown. The wall of ships in the background makes the reality of British sea power, the strength of the empire, look at once commanding and ignoble, even brutal. The same description might apply to the man stretched out on the boat in the foreground, a representative of the new urban culture whose view of the world is self-confidently proprietary, the opposite of soft.