Embankment - Londen

Embankment - Londen, painted around 1901, shows Witsen's engagement with the Thames Embankment during one of his visits to the city. The Victoria Embankment had been completed in 1870 and was one of London's great Victorian engineering achievements, creating a broad riverside walkway where previously the Thames had lapped directly against buildings. By 1900 it was a well-established urban promenade and transportation route. Witsen would have been alert to the parallels with Amsterdam's own waterfront management, and his London subjects have the quality of a Dutch observer finding familiar themes in unfamiliar urban form.

Witsen handles the Thames atmosphere with a tonal softness that acknowledges London's famous fog and diffused light, his palette cooler and more silvery here than in his Amsterdam work. The Embankment's architectural formality provides a geometric contrast to the unstructured expanse of the river.