A hand-coloured engraving by George Cooke of a watercolour by Samuel Prout showing a view across the Thames from the Vauxhall shore towards Westminster Cathedral and the Palace of Westminster. Taken from Cooke’s ‘Views in London and its Vicinity’. In the immediate foreground we are presented with a scene outside a Lambeth boat-builders yard while barges and wherries crowd the river in the middle distance. On the Westminster shore we can see St John’s Smith Square and beyond that the massy bulk of Westminster Abbey, later to sit in a somewhat diminished relation to Barry and Pugin’s rebuilt Houses of Parliament of 1840-1876 Samuel Prout was a great favourite of John Ruskin who went as far as to comment in 1844, “Sometimes I tire of Turner, but never of Prout”. Prout was noted for his paintings of great European cities and picturesque ruins and particularly for his ability to imbue his subjects with ‘breadth and largeness’. George Cooke was leading English line-engraver of the 19th Century and commissioned eight of leading British landscape artists to create works, including this, for his 1826 collection of ‘Views in London and its Vicinity’. This is a first edition of 1827. Interestingly the old Palace of Westminster, depicted here, would burn to the ground only seven years after this work was created.