Thames Diamond Jubilee Pageant and Canaletto's Thames Pageants #1

The River Thames with St. Paul's Cathedral on Lord Mayor's Day (1746)

Canaletto
oil on canvas, 26.8 x 37.6 cm
The Lobkowicz Collections, Prague Castle, Czech Republic

There's going to be a Pageant on the River Thames to mark the Queen's Diamond Jubilee of her accession to the Throne.

1,000 boats are going to make their way down the Thames on Sunday 3rd June - mustering between Hammersmith and Battersea and dispersing from Tower Bridge to West India Docks.

The Thames Diamond Jubilee Pageant has its very own website.  The BBC is also going to be out filming people painting from a bridge - although my own feeling is that the only way to capture the view - as Canaletto did - is to get up much higher than a bridge.  I've got a couple of spots in mind!

There are a couple of famous Canaletto paintings of pageants on the Thames.  The one featured above is currently being portrayed as a mural on a temporary wall at the entrance to London Bridge station.

The painting is currently on loan to the The National Maritime Museum (one of the Royal Museums at Greenwich) for Royal River: Power, Pageantry and the Thames the exhibition to mark the Queen's Diamond Jubilee.

If you want to find out more about Canaletto and his verdute or "view paintings" try my resource About Canaletto - Italian Painter

A veduta (Italian for "view"; plural vedute) is a highly detailed, usually large-scale painting or, actually more often print, of a cityscape or some other vista.

The Landscapes of Georgio Morandi

Larry Groff (Painting Perceptions), a landscape and cityscape painter living in San Diego, has written an  excellent blog post about Giorgio Morandi, The Essence of the Landscape.

I'm with the person who commented to the effect they had no idea that Giorgio Morandi did landscapes as well as still life.

Here's a YouTube video of some of Morandi's work created by Groff - but I do recommend you take a look at the post too.

Here also is what Larry says about his blog.  His sentiments for starting the blog are certainly ones I can identify with and it looks like one which will get added into my Google Reader list.

After painting for about 30 years I’ve often felt discouraged that perceptual painting has often gotten less attention in the major art publications, online venues and art world in general compared to conceptually-based artists. Eventually I asked myself, “why not start a blog devoted to modern painting done from life?”


There are magazines, like American Artist, which has articles about some very good contemporary realists working from life but many of the articles lean towards a more conservative and non-modern style. There are blogs and forums on the web which focus more on academic realism or photorealism but there is little to be found in magazines or blogs that specifically focuses on perceptual painting with a contemporary modern sensibility. This blog aims to correct that problem.