print
- Museum number
- Ii,3.92
- Title
- Object: The Lord Mayors dinner
- Description
-
Interior of the Guildhall looking across men and women eating at tables in three sets of six towards the top table during the 1829 Lord Mayor's dinner, with two footmen in the foreground talking, one holding a bugle, servants preparing silverware to left and clearing to right and two waiters, one black, approaching with dishes from the left foreground. 1829
Lithograph, hand-coloured
- Production date
- 1829
- Dimensions
-
Height: 514 millimetres
-
Width: 340 millimetres
- $Inscriptions
-
- Curator's comments
- Catalogue entry from J.Kierkuc-Bielinski, 'George Scharf', exh. Soane Museum, 2009 (no. 18):
On the Monday following the Lord Mayor’s procession, it was customary for the new Lord Mayor to hold a banquet in the Guildhall in honour of ‘the late Lord Mayor’ as the outgoing incumbent is styled. In this lithograph Scharf has shown the dinner held by William Thompson (1793-1854) who was Lord Mayor from 1828 to 1829 in honour of his predecessor Matthias Prime Lucas. Among those guests invited it was customary to include representatives of the Church, the armed forces, commerce and the government; the Prime Minister would give a speech. The location for the banquet was the Guildhall, building work on which began in 1411 and lasted until 1501. The main part of the structure – the Hall itself – was some 152 ft by 40ft in size. Completed in 1439, it was one of the largest secular Gothic structures in Britain. The Hall was severely damaged in 1666 during the Great Fire of London and was subsequently rebuilt with a new flat roof replacing the old hammer-beam wooden one. Scharf shows the interior of the Guildhall as it appeared following this rebuilding and a further remodelling by George Dance the Younger in 1789. The hall is decorated with the banners bearing the arms of Livery Companies, the walls hung with crimson, festooned lights down the length of the hall with a large star of the Order of the Garter at the far end, below which can just be discerned the figure of Thompson, wearing his ceremonial chain of office. Scharf has also shown several statues to national heroes that had been erected in the Hall, including one to Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson (1758-1805), by James Smith, which can been seen to the left. In the foreground liveried butlers can be seen serving various dishes to the guests, the arrival of the most distinguished of whom would be announced by the two trumpeters. This print was published by Engelmann, Graf, Coindet and Co. of Newman Square, Soho and is dedicated to the Lord Mayor, the Sheriff and the Common Council of the City of London ‘…by their most obedient servant G. Scharf’. This print was exhibited at the National Gallery of Practical Science, Adelaide Street. The subject of the lithograph has also been given by Scharf in German and French, possibly with an eye to a European market as well as a British one . We know that he consigned a number of this lithograph on commission to a dealer in St Petersburg. The lithographs did not make it to Russia – they were lost in a shipwreck.
Selected literature: 'The London Encyclopedia', eds. B. Weinreb and C. Hibbert (Papermac: London, 1993)
- Location
- Not on display
- Exhibition history
-
2009 Mar-Jun, London, Sir John Soane Museum, George Scharf
- Acquisition date
- 1835
- Acquisition notes
- Gift reported to the Trustees Nov 19th 1835, and recorded in the printed 'List of additions made to the collections in the British Museum in the year 1835'.
- Department
- Prints and Drawings
- Registration number
- Ii,3.92
- Additional IDs
-
Other BM number: 1978,U.1979
