Thomas Shotter BOYS (1803-1874). The Quai de Grève and the P - Lot 83

Thomas Shotter BOYS (1803-1874). The Quai de Grève and the Pont d'Arcole in 1840. Oil on canvas. 24 x 33 cm. Exhibitions: - Galerie Charpentier, Paris: le paysage français de Corot à nos jours, 1942. - Galerie Lefranc Engrand. Le paysage français, ses précurseurs, January 1944. On the back, a bill from the painting's owner, showing that the controversies surrounding traffic in the capital are not new: "The Quai de Grève, port de l'Hôtel de Ville, is being totally demolished for the creation of the freeway along the banks of the Seine. What a massacre, what a disaster! ... This February 28, 1966". Thomas Shotter Boys apprenticed in London with the engraver George Cooke. He then moved to Paris, where he met Richard Parkes Bonington, who persuaded him to switch from engraving to painting. He exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts in London for the first time in 1824, and in Paris at the Salon in 1827. In 1830, he went to Brussels, then back to England. He stayed in Paris until 1837 - where he exhibited prints at the Salon in 1835 and published an album with Delpech - before returning to England to lithograph works by David Roberts and Clarkson Stanfield. An integral part of the Romantic imagery, his most famous album is Picturesque Architecture in Paris, containing twenty-eight lithographed plates printed for the first time directly in color on the presses of Charles Joseph Hullmandel in London in 1839, thanks to the "lithotint" process invented by James Duffield Harding, which excludes any form of brush retouching, but instead uses a brush dipped in ink to splash the stone in selected places. He also contributed steel engravings to L'Univers pittoresque (Firmin Didot, Paris, 1835-1863).