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- Title
Messing About In Boats: E. J. Gregory's Boulter's Lock: Sunday Afternoon (R. A. 1897).
- Authors
Tickner, Lisa
- Abstract
Edward John Gregory's Boulter's Lock, Sunday Afternoon, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1897, was described by one critic as 'three-volume novel in art, the guide-book and the encyclopedia of the manners and customs of the English people'. This is a critical trope that goes back at least to Frith, but Gregory's picture-the work of a 'participant observer' - does not indeed bear witness to a new and particularly English phenomenon: the Thames boating craze of the 1890s and the cross-class spectacle at Boulter's itself. This paper discusses the various determinants on Boulter's Lock and its social context: the opening up of the Thames Valley to leisure and tourism by the Great Western Railway; the class and gender significance of working or pleasure boats (the punt and canoe as the 'she and the he of the river world'); the adaptation of new technologies (electric and naptha as well as steam launches); the interests of Gregory's patron, Charles Galloway, the wealthy industrialist who commissioned the work; and its display in the 'British Section' of a number of international exhibitions between 1900 and 1908.
- Subjects
THAMES Valley (England); BOATS &; boating; MANNERS &; customs; ENGLISH people; BRITISH people; CIVILIZATION; RITES &; ceremonies; GREAT Western Railway (Great Britain); GREGORY, John
- Publication
Oxford Art Journal, 2002, Vol 25, Issue 2, p1
- ISSN
0142-6540
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1093/oxartj/25.2.1