The whole city in a few brush strokes

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Last year, at the age of 81, illustrator David Gentleman, best known for his platform-length murals at Charing Cross station, set off with little more than a shoulder bag containing watercolours, paper, brushes and a small camera, to spend a whole year exploring London on foot, with occasional trips on the Tube and by bus. The result is London You’re Beautiful: An Artist’s Year, a month-by- month, densely packed, visual account of what he observed.

Gentleman studied illustration at the Royal College of Art under Edward Bawden and John Nash, and has had a successful career as an illustrator, wood engraver, stamp and coin designer. He has lived in the same street in north London for most of his adult life and has drawn the city many times before, but never in such a concentrated and singleminded burst as this. It’s quite an achievement, a mix of instantly recognisable landmarks and obscure, out of the way corners.

“The purpose ... was to spend a year looking at my own city and painting and drawing it quickly, choosing the pictures not always for their precision or completeness but because they are swift sketches — a diary-like record”.

Hampstead Heath is rendered in just a few broad watercolour brushstrokes and crude lines in black pen, while a view of intersecting railway bridges at Southwark is as detailed as a Piranesi engraving. Here is the Cenotaph, there is a flower seller in Columbia Road, and every now and then are sketches of his grandchildren playing or a jolly family lunch at home.

But London’s most beautiful feature, says Gentleman, is the Thames. “In a densely packed city it provides space and emptiness, distance and detachment, immensity and splendour. I love how the skies are reflected in the colour of the river; how the water itself is always changing,” he writes in his short but engaging text which accompanies the pictures.

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