Watercolour. 21½ by 16 in.
The first Royal Exchange was founded by Sir Thomas Gresham, being opened by Queen Elizabeth 23 January 1570-71. It was destroyed in the Great Fire.
The second Exchange, designed by Edward Jarman or Jerman, City surveyor, and begun 1667, was, like the earlier one, a quadrangular building, with a clock tower on the chief front facing Cornhill. Business was transacted in the covered walk or cloister within. The statue of Charles II in the centre was by Grinling Gibbons.
This view was drawn from the north-west corner of the walk; the pinnacles of St. Michael’s church tower, Cornhill, appear above the building.
Unsigned. Date probably about 1810. Lent by Sir E. Coates.
32 VIEW FROM A HOUSE IN PALL MALL.
Watercolour. 11¼ by 14¾ in.
This view is signed and dated 1824, and forms a fitting companion to [No. 34], which is of the same style. The artist, William Hunt, born in 1790, had a great reputation in his day as a painter of fruit, flowers, birds’ nests, and other subjects of the kind, and also of rustic figures. His landscape is less known, and the works by him here exhibited are executed with unusual freedom. In these examples much of the outline is drawn with a pen.
The artist in this case must have been sitting on the balustraded projection of a building, long ago destroyed, on the north side of Pall Mall. He looked east, and the steeple of the church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields appears in the distance.
By W. Hunt, 1824 (1790-1864). Lent by Mr. T. Girtin.