Etchings Institutions search term: dowdeswell
Drury Lane |  Freer Gallery of Art (1887.17) | |
| Number: | 243 | |
| Date: | 1880/1881 | |
| Medium: | etching | |
| Size: | 164 x 103 mm | |
| Signed: | butterfly at upper right | |
| Inscribed: | no | |
| Set/Publication: | 'Second Venice Set', 1886 | |
| No. of States: | 1 | |
| Known impressions: | 26 | |
| Catalogues: | K.237; M.234; W.176 | |
| Impressions taken from this plate (26) | ||
KEYWORD
children, passageway, people, shop-front, shop, streetscape.
TITLE
It has always been called by the same title, as in the following examples:
'Drury Lane' (1883, F.A.S). 1
'Drury Lane' (1886, Frederick Wedmore (1844-1921)). 2
'Drury Lane' (1883, F.A.S). 1
'Drury Lane' (1886, Frederick Wedmore (1844-1921)). 2
1: London FAS 1883 (cat. no. 31).
2: Wedmore 1886 A , cat. no. 176
DESCRIPTION
In the foreground are four small children at left, and one at right, standing at the entrance to a wide passageway through a building. Above the passage is a tiled or shingled wall and the base of a window. On the far side of the passage is a narrow street, with a figure on the pavement in front of a shop on a street corner. To right of the corner shop is a lamp-post, and behind it, to right, there are more shops and figures across a street.
SITE
Drury Lane, London, known then as now as a centre of theatres and entertainment, was also an area of terrible poverty, squalor and deprivation. In 1883 a critic described this etching as 'a curious vista view, seen through a gateway, of the dirty, dismal, but not unpicturesque-looking houses of Drury-lane.' 3
3: Anon., 'The Studio. An Arrangement in White and Yellow', The Queen, 24 February 1883 (GUL PC 25/24).