A signed, oil on canvas view of the Royal procession along the Embankment during the Silver Jubilee of  King George V in 1935.

The 1902 State Landau carrying the King and Queen Mary is shown passing between the steps of the City of London School and the River Thames. This stretch of the Thames, originally known as Blackfriars Reach, was renamed King’s Reach in honour of the Sovereign in his Jubilee Year. The form of Joseph Cubitt’s historic Blackfriars Railway Bridge of 1864 (demolished 1985) can just be made out between the road bridge of 1869 and the rail bridge of 1886 by John Wolfe Barry and Henry Marc Brunel.

The scholars of the City of London School can be seen waving and craning to catch a glimpse of the Royal couple as the carriage processes from St Pauls Cathedral to Buckingham Palace.  The City of London School departed this site at Blackfriars in 1984 and the former school building now houses the British and European headquarters of the Financiers J.P. Morgan.

 

The painter George Charlton was born in London in 1899. He studied at the Slade School of Fine Art from 1914 before joining the staff in 1919. He later taught at the Willesden School of Art from 1949–59 and was an examiner in art for the University of London for many years. Showed widely in London he achieved his first one-man show at Cork Street’s Redfern Gallery in 1924 before exhibiting solo at the avant-garde Beaux Arts Gallery on Bruton Place. His work is held by the Tate Gallery in London.