A framed black-line etching by the American artist and engraver James MacNeil Whistler showing shipping off Eagle Wharf off Wapping in the Pool of London.

Taken from  'A Series of Sixteen Etchings of Scenes on the Thames and Other Subjects', otherwise referred to as The Thames Set, the pictures were created over a period of 12 years starting in 1859 and finally published as a complete set by Ellis & Green in London in 1871.

Eagle Wharf (Tyzac, Whiteley & Co.) is one of the more famous and dramatic etchings made by Whistler when he moved near Tower Bridge in 1859. It was one of the selection published in 1871 as A Series of Sixteen Etchings of Scenes on the Thames (the “Thames Set”). These focus on the Pool of London, the furthest point upstream that large ships could navigate. In the foreground we cannot miss the Cockney in a dinghy, one of the heroic cast of characters in Whistler’s deliberately confrontational, working-class realism. The Whistler expert Katharine Lochnan writes of this type: ‘They stare out at the viewer, making no apologies for their low social status or unkempt condition. They are never idealized, but are one with the landscape which is a physical extension of themselves’

Katharine Lochnan, The Etchings of James McNeill Whistler (New Haven and Toronto, 1984)