Edward John Gregory's Boulter's Lock, Sunday Afternoon , exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1897, was described by one critic as 'the three-volume novel in art, the guide-book and encyclopaedia of the manners and customs of the English people'. This is a critical trope that goes back at least to Frith, but Gregory's picture - the work of a 'participant observer' - does indeed bear witness to a new
... [Show full abstract] and particularly English phenomenon: the Thames boating craze of the 1890s and the cross-class spectacle at Boulter's itself. This paper discusses the various determinants on Boulter's Lock and its social context: the opening up of the Thames Valley to leisure and tourism by the Great Western Railway; the class and gender significance of working or pleasure boats (the punt and canoe as the 'she and the he of the river world'); the adaptation of new technologies (electric and naptha as well as steam launches); the interests of Gregory's patron, Charles Galloway, the wealthy industrialist who commissioned the work; and its display in the 'British Section' of a number of international exhibitions between 1900 and 1908.
