Doorway, Temple, frontispiece to Original Views of London as It Is
Medium
Hand-colored lithograph on paper
Dimensions
45.2 × 32.5 cm (17 13/16 × 12 13/16 in.)
Classification
lithograph
Department
Prints and Drawings
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
38267
Rights
Public Domain
Art Historical Context
Thomas Shotter Boys’s “Doorway, Temple” served as the frontispiece to his 1842 portfolio *Original Views of London as It Is*, a series of twenty-six hand-colored lithographs that captured the city’s streets, monuments, and everyday architecture during the early Victorian period. At a moment when London was expanding rapidly through industrialization and urban renewal, Boys chose to record both grand landmarks and quieter corners such as the historic legal enclave known as the Temple, presenting the metropolis “as it is” rather than as an idealized past. Executed as a hand-colored lithograph o...
About the Artist
Thomas Shotter Boys · 1803–1874
Thomas Shotter Boys was born on 2 January 1803 in Pentonville, London, and received his first professional training as an apprentice to the engraver George Cooke. When his apprenticeship concluded he crossed the Channel to Paris, a move that would transform his artistic direction entirely. There he encountered Richard Parkes Bonington, the brilliant English watercolourist whose fresh, luminous ren...