from
The Wapping Group of Artists

Sixty Years of Painting by the Thames

by P. Banning et al.

FOREWORD

The Wapping Group is the last proper artists’ society left in England. The rest are but loose associations of exhibiting artists who meet rarely if ever at intermittent exhibition time; who collide but briefly on sending-in day; who occasionally jostle uneasily in selecting fellow members at election time. A sense of confraternity has been lost amongst those predictable
aggregations of strangers, who are identified as members of a group only by the letters after their name and the gentle cloning of their art, as envy and uncertainty direct them to adopt the style and mannerisms of the most successful artist.

Not so the Wapping Group, that still continues to vigorously reinvent itself in the traditional artists’ way; to meet, to greet, to paint together, eat together, to talk, argue, criticise and discuss, to learn and earn.

Artists are better for mingling, they are improved by shared experience even if it seems so subtle as to be imperceptible to measurement. For the Wapping Group it is perhaps ymbolised with jolly banality by that first convivial drink at the pub after a cold afternoon on the Thames.

Now, do not think of the Wappers as a laddish group
of daubers who need an excuse to go the pub without their
wives, or a bunch of Sunday splashers who need collective
reassurance in the respite hours from the office job. No,
this is serious professional group who are bound together
for their spiritual and technical advancement and, yes,
have a good time on the way.

Too great a claim? Well, think back to a group with wider concerns than the Thames and who are art-historically more celebrated – the founder members of the London Sketch Club. It is inconceivable that the likes of the Beggarstaff Brothers (Pryde and Nicholson), John Hassall, Cecil Aldin, H. M. Bateman, Heath Robinson and Tom Browne, in changing the look of twentieth-century
illustration and advertising, did not get part of their inspiration from the weekly set subject, hot supper and high-spirited smokers and theatricals.

As the Wapping Group line up on the bank of the most fascinating river in the world there is on display a variety of styles and talents. Technique and application vary wildly and though all artists are confronting the same subject their aims and approach differ interestingly.
Some are poets, mood men searching out the misty atmospherics of dawn and sunset, rain and sun. Others the
tideway technocrats, who know every knot and splinter of
the boat, sailors at heart who could be aboard with ease and log the joggle shackle, dob the gobsticks and abeam
the futtocks with the best of them.

The results are an ever-changing celebration of an ever-changing stretch of river whose beautiful elemental force divides our man-made city.

Like the Wapping Group, my West End gallery also has traditional aims rooted in the art of the natural world. Remaining faithful to this art, the Wappers have prospered
for sixty years. I wish them well for the next sixty.

Chris Beetles
June 2005

INTRODUCTION

This book is a welcome opportunity to look back over the first sixty years of the Wapping Group of Artists, as well as to celebrate the work of its current members.

Since being established in 1946, the artists of the Wapping Group have carried on their work, observing and painting London’s river. The natural, challenging and exciting changes in this landscape, not only over six decades, but indeed from week to week, have been recorded from individual perspectives and are well illustrated in these pages.

We were founded to be an artists’ society – to meet together each week because we enjoyed each others’ company, to paint together in companionable fellowship and encouragement, and to enjoy a pint at the pub afterwards. I believe our new book conveys much of this essential nature of the Wapping Group; this is not primarily a history of the Thames seen through artists’ eyes, nor just another book about painting, but instead it gives a real feeling of what it is like to be a ‘Wapper’, and why this group is so special both to our members and to our many friends from around the world.

As current President of the Group, I welcome you on behalf of all our 25 members. We hope you will find our work and thoughts on the challenges of open-air painting interesting and, to those budding painters among you,
encouraging.

Bill Davies
President, The Wapping Group of Artists

CHAPTER 1. SIXTY YEARS OF PAINTING LONDON AND THE RIVER THAMES

The Wapping Group of Artists must be one of the oldest societies of working painters in the country. It was founded to depict the life of the River Thames, and for sixty years its members have met every week between April and September with that same purpose: to celebrate the River Thames in all its aspects and moods by painting subjects on the spot.

As early as 1938 a group of painters was filmed for a Pathé newsreel titled ‘At work down Wapping way’ and in 1939 members of the Artists Society and Langham Sketching Club, originally founded in 1830 for the purpose of drawing and painting the human figure, decided to devote the summer months to sketching by the tideway. Here was the opportunity to keep in touch with one another and spend some hours painting together – then, after their creative labours, to relax and chat at the local pub. The Group began as it meant to go on. One day at the ‘Prospect of Whitby’ pub in Wapping, over a convivial pint, someone said ‘we ought to call ourselves the Wapping Group’. Thus the founding group of painters chose as their sketching ground the Thames from the Pool of London down to Blackwall and Rotherhithe.

St. Paul's after the Blitz. Watercolour, Jack Merriott.

THE FOUNDING OF THE GROUP

The Second World War brought such pleasant activities to
a halt, but in 1946, at another meeting of the Langham
Sketching Club, the same enthusiasts proposed to take up
the idea again. With unanimous and enthusiastic
approval, the Wapping Group was officially founded.
There were twenty-one founder members, and the
maximum membership at any one time was set at twentyfive.
Among the leading figures in the beginning were
Arthur Burgess, Wilfred Fryer, Jack Merriott, James
Middleton, Eric Thorp and William Watkins – all artists of
established reputation, many of them senior members of
other art societies. The first President was Jack Merriott,
and the very eminent artist Sir Frank Brangwyn was

delighted to accept the post of Honorary Vice President.
An inaugural supper was held at the ‘Prospect of
Whitby’ on 16 May 1947, and later in the year the first
exhibition took place at the Port of London Authority
headquarters on Tower Hill, by kind permission of Sir
John Anderson, then Chairman of the PLA. Opened by the
writer A. P. Herbert, the exhibition brought the Group to
public notice and enjoyed much support from shipping
and marine insurance interests in the City; it was also
reported in a special article in the Picture Post issue of 16
August 1947. The Group was firmly established and has
never looked back. At some time, certainly as early as 1947
or 1948, a nickname appeared. We were ‘the Wappers’.

Beached boat. Gouache, Sir Frank Brangwyn RA.

Pat Jobson sketching at Bankside (Picture Post, 16 August 1947). Photo © Hulton Getty

Sir Frank Brangwyn. Watercolour portrait by Pat Jobson

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