Walter and Water

With a couple of hours free to meander in London last week, I popped in to the Courtauld Gallery.  I haven't been there much, but it has several paintings I really like, and it is small and easy to get around when you don't have much time.  (For those who don't know, it is on the Strand, at the entrance to Somerset House).

A new painting was on show, by Walter Dobson.  The Courtauld Web site has more about this, which is part of a series of displays and films instigated by Waldemar Januszczak, as part of the anniversary of his birth 400 years ago.

This is part of what the Courtauld Web site says:

The Courtauld possesses one of Dobson’s most accomplished and intriguing pictures, Portrait of an Old and a Younger Man. The two richly dressed gentlemen have generally been recognised as a father and son lost in private grief, perhaps at the death of a wife or mother. However, recent research by Januszczak has identified them as two poets exiled in Oxford with Charles I during the English Civil War.  The older man is John Taylor (1578-1653), a notorious London figure, nicknamed the Water-Poet.  Before developing his literary ambitions, Taylor began his career ferrying people across the Thames at Southwark, and during the English Civil War, as an ardent Royalist he joined the King in Oxford where he was made the official Water Bailiff. The younger man is Sir John Denham (1614/5-1669), a more typical gentleman poet of the times, and author of the first great topographic poem in the English language, Cooper’s Hill.  Centred on a description of the Thames, Cooper’s Hill is actually a poetic rumination upon British history from a Royalist perspective.  Having been governor of Farnham Castle, Denham also joined the King in Oxford in 1643. 

 And there is a dedicated Web Site set up for the anniversary.

So anyway, here we are again with John Taylor, who I bumped into on a previous occasion when I had a meander around London and ended up in the pub named after him.