The show brings together a chronological selection of artworks exploring the different ways British and London-based artists have pictured the Bridge. The earliest views by the Victorian maritime painter W. L. Wyllie through the modernity of Frank Brangwyn‘s working river, and the dramatic wartime imagery of Charles Pears, right up to the modern London skyline by Chris Orr.
This exhibition also showcases one artist’s remarkable life-long preoccupation with Tower Bridge. Jim Page-Roberts first embarked on documenting the Bridge in the 1940s in a series of photographs. In the early 1960s he bought a warehouse on the Thames in Limehouse and has since produced a large body of haunting poetic views of the river with barges, showing the Bridge recurring as a ghost-like monument presiding over the docklands, most notably a captivating ‘Self-Portrait with the Tower Bridge’ (1965).
In addition, the London-based Ecuadorian New Expressionist Mentor Chico has been especially commissioned to create a vibrant, up-to-the-minute painting of the relationship between Tower Bridge and the City entitled Forever Imagical Tower Bridge 2014, conveying the vibrancy of the Bridge in relation to the City visitors, vessels and vehicles.