The Club Houses and Pall Mall, plate thirteen from Original Views of London as It Is
Medium
Hand-colored lithograph on paper
Dimensions
31.2 × 45 cm (12 5/16 × 17 3/4 in.)
Classification
lithograph
Department
Prints and Drawings
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
131157
Art Historical Context
Thomas Shotter Boys’s “The Club Houses and Pall Mall” offers a lively glimpse of London’s West End in 1842. As plate thirteen from his celebrated series “Original Views of London as It Is,” the hand-colored lithograph depicts the elegant row of gentlemen’s clubs that lined this prestigious street, a hub of social and political life in Victorian Britain. Boys, known for his precise cityscapes, captures carriages, pedestrians, and the stately façades with remarkable clarity. The medium itself is significant: lithography allowed artists to reproduce intricate details affordably, while delicate h...
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...