BUTLER'S WHARF, BERMONDSEY, 1988
signed with initials lower right
gouache, pen and ink on paper
53 x 38cm (69 x 53.4cm framed)

Property from a Distinguished Private Collection

Provenance
Acquired by the present owner in 1988

Exhibited
Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, Roger Wagner: Paintings, 1994, no. 15

For over two centuries London’s Docklands were the most important part of the most important city in the British Empire. It was the commercial engine behind London’s growth, and its link to the rest of the world, where goods, people and ideas freely flowed. However, by the 1980s, the huge stretch of land from Tower Bridge to Greenwich, with Bermondsey here depicted, had become a graveyard. Containerisation rendered the upstream wharves obsolete; vessels grew too large for the locks, and cargo migrated downriver to Tilbury and across to Felixstowe. The East India Docks closed in 1967, the London and St Katharine in 1968, the Surrey Commercial in 1970, and the Royals, the largest of them all, in 1981. Some 150,000 jobs went with them, and with those jobs an entire riverside culture. What Roger Wagner records, the long shadows, empty warehouses and cranes wailing in the wind reflects this uncertainty. A lost world, an area bereft of purpose, prefiguring the shiny new flats and offices that will soon come to replace the ghosts.

Wagner is a painter of unembarrassed religious conviction who draws immediate comparison to Stanley Spencer, and this attitude of belief is emphatically present here. What he took from Spencer was the central conceit of his own practice: the transposition of biblical episode into contemporary English landscape, not as irony or provocation, but as the straightforward continuation of a tradition that had always placed the Nativity in Umbria and the Baptism in the Tuscan hills. Here, the Docklands become the Babylonian land of exile, haunted by memory.