Greenwich Hospital

Location

Country: Bahrain
City: Manama
Place: British Embassy

Edmund Walker began as a miniature painter on ivory, abandoning the practice as photography grew in popularity. He then turned to architectural draughtsmanship, making sketches of country seats and selling them to the owners. His views of the Thames Embankment (completed 1870) were exhibited at the Royal Academy, as were many of his architectural drawings. Sometime before 1851 he began working for the publishers Day & Son. He made watercolour views and lithographs of the interiors of the Great Exhibition and lithographed William Simpson’s sketches of the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny for the firm. He reportedly ‘never fully recovered’ from the effect of the failing fortunes of Day & Son, late in his career. Walker died in 1882, aged 68.
Landscape lithographer and painter Thomas Picken was the younger brother of draughtsman and lithographer Andrew (1815-1845). The brothers were two of four sons of novelist Andrew Picken (1788-1833) and his wife Janet Coxon (1792-1871). Thomas made lithographs for David Roberts's ‘The Holy Land’ (1842-49), William Payne's ‘The Lake Scenery of England’ (1859), John Parker Lawson's ‘Scotland Delineated’ (1847-54) and other works. He exhibited one painting at the Royal Academy in 1857 and ten at the Society of Artists, Suffolk Street (1846-75). Although generally thought to have emigrated to Australia in 1870, a 2004 entry in the ‘Oxford Dictionary of National Biography’ reports that he was an inmate of the Charterhouse, London, from 1879.

Places

England, London

Subjects

topography, townscape/cityscape, Victorian Genre, hospital

Materials & Techniques

lithograph, coloured lithograph

Artist

Edmund Walker (1813/14 - 1882)
Thomas Picken (1815 - 1870)

Title

Greenwich Hospital

Date

Medium

Coloured lithograph

Acquisition

Purchased from Vicars Bros, July 1955

GAC number

3275