Doorway, Temple, frontispiece to Original Views of London as It Is

Art Historical Context

Thomas Shotter Boys’s “Doorway, Temple” served as the frontispiece to his 1842 portfolio *Original Views of London as It Is*, a series of twenty-six hand-colored lithographs that captured the city’s streets, monuments, and everyday architecture during the early Victorian period. At a moment when London was expanding rapidly through industrialization and urban renewal, Boys chose to record both grand landmarks and quieter corners such as the historic legal enclave known as the Temple, presenting the metropolis “as it is” rather than as an idealized past. Executed as a hand-colored lithograph on paper, the work demonstrates the medium’s capacity for precise architectural detail combined with the warmth of watercolor tinting. Lithography, still relatively new in the 1840s, allowed artists to reproduce fine line work at moderate cost, while the addition of delicate color by hand gave each impression a unique, painterly quality. Measuring just over 17 by 12 inches, the print invites close looking at the carved stone doorway and the play of light across its surface. Today housed in the Art Institute of Chicago’s department of Prints and Drawings, Boys’s frontispiece offers visitors an intimate glimpse of how one artist used emerging print technology to preserve a fleeting image of mid-nineteenth-century London.

About the Artist

Thomas Shotter Boys · 1803–1874

Thomas Shotter Boys was born on 2 January 1803 in Pentonville, London, and received his first professional training as an apprentice to the engraver George Cooke. When his apprenticeship concluded he crossed the Channel to Paris, a move that would transform his artistic direction entirely. There he encountered Richard Parkes Bonington, the brilliant English watercolourist whose fresh, luminous ren...