Signed l.r.: W.Greaves

Oil on canvas, 40 by 59.5 cm (15 ¾ by 22 ¼ ins)

In 1863, Walter Greaves, a Thames boatman and untrained artist met the great American painter, James Abbott McNeill Whistler. He subsequently became his studio assistant, mixing his paints, preparing his canvases and taking him out at night on his river boat to observe parts of the London river Greaves knew so well. The result of these trips were Whistler’s great nocturnes, including Nocturne: Blue and Gold, Old Battersea Bridge (1871-77) and Nocturne in Blue and Silver (1872-78). Yet by the end of the century Whistler had dropped Greaves. When in 1911 William Marchant launched a major exhibition at the Goupil Gallery rediscovering Greaves and suggesting that there was a far more significant mutual influence between the two artists, Whistler’s biographer Joseph Pennells accused Greaves of plagiarism, condemning his art once again to obscurity. Despite widespread support from artists such as Augustus John, Walter Sickert and William Nicholson he was to die penniless in 1830. Today, although Greaves’s dating remains notoriously unreliable (he appears to have guessed when he painted many of his pictures), his reputation is being justly rebuilt. His own nocturnes, of which the present painting is a fine example, can at their best show an inspiration and originality that are close to those by his master and are a perfect portrayal of the tones and shades of a river that Greaves perhaps knew better than any other artist of his age.