Oil painting, 'The Thames - Evening', John Robertson Reid, 1886

Oil painting

Given by James Orrock

Given by James Orrock, 1900

Historical significance: John Robertson Reid (1851-1926) was a Scottish painter of genre, landscape and coastal scenes. Although initially apprenticed for three years to an Edinburgh firm of house-painters, he went on to study at the Edinburgh School of Art and at the Royal Scottish Academy. He settled in the south of England, and exhibited at the Royal Academy in London from 1877.

In 1874, the year of the first Impressionist exhibition in Paris, Reid began painting 'en plein air'. This was not new in British art - Constable for example had worked in the open air as well as in his studio - but Reid was among the first artists publicly to propagandize the fact and extol the virtues of the practice. However, his style owes more to the French painter of rural scenes and figures Jules Bastien-Lepage than the Impressionists proper. Reid was interested in group scenes and social interactions, and had a great ability to express individual character through subtleties of pose and expression. This is evident here in the figure of the foreground gentleman inspecting his fishing-line, and the girl in profile absorbed in quiet contemplation of the view.

This view of the river Thames to the west of London, with the sun setting behind the trees throwing the path into deep shadow while just catching the central figure group with golden light, also reveals the influence of Japanese art in the pattern made by the overhanging branch against the sky.

This painting was exhibited at the Institute of Painters in Oil in 1886-7. E.E. Chancellor, in a work entitled Walks Among London's Pictures (1910) gave the following description of it: 'There is much beauty and instinct for colour in this clever work, and the sunset (out of the picture) reflected on the group of children watching the angler (in a white top hat) fixing his bait, is admirably rendered.' (p.250.)

The Thames - Evening was presented to the Museum in 1900 by the artist and collector James Orrock, a vocal advocate of British painting which he felt was not adequately represented in British museums. His gift of 27 oils and watercolours to the V&A (which before the establishment of the Tate Gallery was the National Gallery of British Art) was intended to address this issue.

16-1900