1830s Lisbon: A Tale of the Tagus

Fascinating cataloguing an intriguing group of early 19th-century views in Portugal this week, and thinking about the difficulty in verifying views in a time before photography and when the documentary evidence is scant. The lively sketches evidence Lisbon as a bustling city with a significant military presence, much of it British in the years after the Peninsular War and the eviction of the French—and the Tagus river central to this protection, trade and daily life.

The view of Belém Tower (image 4) is a case in point, which here, unsually, shows building directly side-on but with the Lisbon hillside ascending behind. In fact the most widely distributed image of the tower at the time was Clarkson Stanfield's, in ‘Finden’s Landscape and Portrait Illustrations of Lord Byron’s Life and Works’ (image 5), which itself had no small degree of poetic licence, omitting the two-storey garrison addition that is seen in our drawing, and contemporaneous examples by William Paget (image 6) and Lt Col Batty FRS (image 7).