Today is the Sunday before Battle of Britain Day, which falls on 15 September, so this week’s picture shows London during the Blitz: David Bomberg’s charcoal drawing of 1945, entitled Evening in the City of London, which is in the prints and drawings collection of Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.
Like many another wartime Londoner, Bomberg was struck by the seemingly miraculous way in which Christopher Wren’s great cathedral of St Paul’s had survived the incessant bombing attacks of the Nazis. He took care to show the cathedral from a distance, framed by the desolation around it. According to the artist’s wife, Lilian Bomberg, “He got permission to climb to the top of a church, in Cheapside, I think, and painted St Paul’s from its east side.” The church in question was probably St Bride’s. Access to public buildings deemed to be prime targets for enemy attack was severely restricted. “There was always an element of danger,” Lilian Bomberg recalled, because “we didn’t know when the raids were taking place. David went out in spite of this. He did worry about it, and it interfered with his drawing.”
Evening in the City of London certainly has the air of having been done quickly, at a single sitting, although the sense of urgency imposed on him by circumstance seems in this case to have enhanced rather than interfered with Bomberg’s response to the scene before him. The medium that he chose, soft charcoal, was well suited to an artist in a hurry and had the additional advantage of being extremely cheap – an important consideration, sinc Bomberg was not at all well off during the Second World War. Smudged in places, perhaps to suggest smoke rising from the devastated city, it has a feel and a texture entirely appropriate...
