Thames Police

James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) focused many of his works on the Thames. He stayed at a pub in the unfashionable area of Wapping during 1859, so that he could have easy access to London's docklands and produced a set of sixteen etchings which he called The Thames Set. He chose sites which were threatened by the creation of the river embankment and began recording their vanishing 'beauties'.

Charles Baudelaire, the French author greatly admired these prints when they were exhibited in Paris in 1862. He described them as 'representing the banks of the Thames: wonderful tangles of rigging, yardarms and rope, a hotchpotch of fog, furnaces and corkscrews of smoke: the profound and intricate poetry of a vast capital'.

These etchings established Whistler's reputation in Britain, France and America. The view is taken on the riverfront outside the Thames Police building at Wapping Wharf.