Associate Artists at the National Gallery    Help | Credits | Feedback

The National Gallery Homepage  Back to John Virtue's homepage

Preparatory Work

 John Virtue Home Working at the Gallery: Preparatory work OXO Tower

Photos © The National Gallery, London and Tino Tedaldi

Choose another location 

You will need Flash Player to view this page.
Non-Flash version 

 John Virtue

On the South Bank of the Thames the thing that I found extraordinary was that when I went to the Oxo tower - just in front of it at ground level - it reared right up so that it actually made, naturally made, a compositional vertical for any size painting, whether it was 3 inches high or 4 metres high.

It held a view right across - with the horizontal structure of Blackfriars bridge - so you had an L shape that would frame whatever you wanted to do, which was the city of London.

So there was another site. I immediately started working - sometimes when the tide was out on the mud - on three particular jetties grouped around the OXO tower.