A Collier in the Thames<br><p>Oil painting, inscribed signed and dated, lower left, 'J Salmon- 1874 / Collier on the Thames'.  This is a good and late example of an oil painting by a London and Kent artist who was much more prolific and better known as a watercolourist. He was born in or about 1808 and in 1859 moved to Erith on the Thames, but returned to London by 1869. His final move was to Gravesend, Kent, where he died in November 1886. He mainly did marine subjects but also some landscapes, exhibiting two oils at the Royal Academy in 1849 and 1853 and more at the Society of British Artists before finally only showing watercolours there to a later date. The date on the picture was misread (until 2012) as 1814, leaving the artist as unidentifiable for that early period. However, it is clearly a later-19th-century image in terms of the shipping and general style, and the mistake arose from the way the '87' in the date is linked together. The inscription itself is also consistent with Salmon's writing on other works, mainly watercolours.<br></p>
A Collier in the Thames
<bdi><a href="https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q21289263" class="extiw" title="d:Q21289263"><span title="British painter">John Francis Salmon</span></a>
</bdi>
1874<div style="display: none;">date QS:P571,+1874-00-00T00:00:00Z/9</div>
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