Thomas Shotter Boys 1842 pair of hand coloured prints views of the Thames London

Condition:  Good condition, used mounts.  Some light spotting which is visible in the sky areas (please see images).

The full title of these prints are "London Bridge etc from Southwark Bridge", and "Blackfriars, from Southwark Bridge", so they make a nice pair, being upstream and downstream from about the same viewpoint. The plates were published in 1842 by Thomas Shotter Boys, under the title "Original Views of London as it is Drawn from Nature, and Lithographed by Thomas Shotter Boys".

There are relatively few views of London produced at this time, and colour lithography was in its infancy.  Shotter Boys himself had already produced the first English book with colour lithographic plates, but he chose to issue these prints in monotone with hand colour which he may have done himself.  Different examples tend to show different colours chosen for some details.

Thomas Shotter Boys was born in Pentonville, North London. He was apprenticed to engraver George Cook, before moving to Paris during the 1820s. There he met Richard Parkes Bonington, with whom he worked. He returned to England in 1837 and initially engraved the designs of other artists and contributed to publications. In 1839, Boys produced his own publication, ‘Picturesque Architecture in Paris, Ghent and Antwerp’, the first English book with lithographic plates entirely in colour. He was elected a member of the New Water Colour Society in 1841 and in the following year published ‘Original Views of London As It Is’. Boys spent the last 20 years of his life teaching drawing and working as a lithographer. He died aged 71 in St John's Wood.