Changing views of London
14th August 2024
The only known painting of London by a female Irish artist of the 18th century has thrown light on the city’s development over the last 300 years.
Susanna Drury's only known London landscape has sold at auction in Salisbury for £81,900 - a record price for the artist.
Susanna Drury was brought up in Dublin and was influential in the development of Irish landscape painting. Her depictions of the Giant’s Causeway brought international attention to the site when they were copied as engravings by François Vivares and distributed across Europe. Two of the views were submitted to the Dublin Society Exhibition and won her the society’s £25 premium.
Her only known view of London was painted in the area of One Tree Hill in Greenwich. It looks across the meander in the River Thames to the Isle of Dogs, where the line of windmills can be seen that gave Millwall its name. The mills were used for grinding corn from the surrounding fields but had been demolished by the early 19th century as Millwall turned from a farming peninsula to the heart of London’s ship-building industry. Today it is even more unrecognisable, as the regeneration of the 1980s saw the building of Canary Wharf.
Drury’s 1733 view of London came up for auction at Woolley and Wallis in Salisbury after 50 years in the same private collection.
“Works by Drury are extremely rare,” explained Paintings specialist, Ed Beer, from the Salisbury auction house. “Little is known about Drury’s life and training, though suggestion has been made that this particular work could have been executed during a period of artistic training in London. While the view that Drury looked out on has changed substantially, there are some buildings – such as St Alfege Church and St Paul’s Cathedral – which have endured, despite being relatively recently built at the time the painting was executed.”
The gouache work, signed and dated 1733, sold on 4th September for a premium-inclusive £81,900.
