Walter Greaves 1846-1930
Nocturne, Old Battersea Bridge, 1885
oil on canvas
15 x 23 ins


Provenance
Roland, Browse and Delbanco



'The simple god-fearing artist son of a Chelsea boatman' as his great supporter William Marchant of the Goupil Gallery once described him, Walter Greaves is one of the most intriguing and unlikely figures in late 19th century British art. The painter, as a young man, of one of the greatest primitive pictures in English Art, Hammersmith Bridge on Boat Race Day, Greaves then met Whistler in the early 1860’s and, as well as becoming his boatman (remarkably Greaves’s father had been the same to J M W Turner) also became his pupil, and before their tragic falling-out, close friend. As this atmospheric little Nocturne reveals, Whistler’s influence was to prove extremely strong, though Greaves’s eye for topographical incident and detail always gives his work its own very distinctive character. Enough for Sickert, another Whistler disciple, to observe of Greaves’s first exhibition in 1911 'I came, I saw and was bowled over...Walter Greaves is a great master.'