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 Almost all the
views of Bridge Street we currently have - apart from the interior below - show the same area of
the west side of the street. Louise must have found the east side singularly uninteresting!This one is a large detail from the right hand side of Bridge Street, Chester painted between 1869 and 1873 - reproduced here because it's much clearer than the others and gives the best view of St Peter's Church at the Cross, with the Victoria Dining Rooms to the left of it. The painting also shows the two corners of the street as they were before the Tudor-style rebuild of 1888/92. (Other views of the street would be very welcome - especially of the East side) [Grosvenor Museum collection, large print available.] |
 This smaller view shows
Chester as Louise probably first knew it - it's 1868 or earlier. The method of dating is given below.The title "shopping day" is a generic, and like "a busy street" and others was probably applied long after Louise was in the next world. The church does not lean like this in the original painting! |
The next two pictures are interesting for the story that lies behind them.
The first view is a photograph of a painting called Chester: Bridge Street looking South.
It's one of Louise's early Chester views, and it must be 1869 as it shows the flags out for a visit by the
Prince of Wales. Even in monochrome, some of the flags are instantly recognisable, including the Japanese
Rising Sun on the left.
Now we have a very similar view, but this time the actual painting. In fact it's the same painting. The buyer decided he didn't want all those flags and had nearly all of them removed. While we don't know for certain that Louise did the removal, alterations to watercolours were quite tricky, so it's very likely that she did do the work. 
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 Because Louise was so fond of this street, her paintings are a history of it.Bridge Street, Chester shows the view south from the church above. At extreme left, we get a glimpse of steps up to the east-side Row. On the right, only two premises are missing from the top of the street, and we can look all the way down past The Plane Tree (the tallest building) to the next street junction. The period is 1873 to 1888. Sotheby's auctioned the painting in December 2001 for £21,200. |
An interior view of Bridge Street Row East on the corner with Eastgate Street,
looking out to the Cross and the staircase up to St Peter's Church. Although we have no date for the
picture, tramlines are visible outside. But the Row has not yet been rebuilt, so the period is limited
to 1879 to 1888. Whilst Louise is often meticulous in creating detail or the look of it, the shop to the
right [actually John Wild, Hosier and Glover] is reproduced quite vaguely, with very little to indicate
what it sells. This may, of course, have been deliberate, to keep the viewer's eye looking out towards the
daylight. [Grosvenor Museum collection, included in Picturesque Chester.] |
 This is another photo (of 20 or more) that Louise had taken of her paintings. We have no official title for this view, but it obviously shows Bridge Street, West Side, looking north, and it's full of trigger dates. |
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Through the smoky atmosphere (actually the photograph decaying) we can see the tiny peak that St. Peter's
church had on its tower until 1886. There are no tram lines so this is before 1879. The most prominent
buildings are the Dutch Houses, wooden-framed buildings of the mid-17th century with plasterwork added.
Next to them is the smaller jutting bay of a less visually-demanding building, and the presence of
this building now dates the picture before 1873, as we'll shortly see. Finally, we look again at
the skyline to the gap between the church tower and the chimney stack to the left, and what we don't
see is the town hall spire, completed in 1869 (and possibly visible by 1868), so it's earlier still. Louise
came to Chester sometime in the later 1860s, but seems to have been taking commissions before she actually
settled there. She didn't date all her paintings (so we'd be happy to hear of further pointers on these
paintings). But with even just a little help from histories of a local area - in this case Picturesque Chester - it's possible to bracket the date. |
 Now we
have this view of Bridge Street, Chester, rendered monochrome by the University of Georgia to advertise an
exhibition of British Watercolorsfrom the West Foundation Collection at the Georgia Museum of Art in 2002 - and for all the reasons just given, it's much later than the one above. |
The town hall now looms in the distance; a new tall building sits alongside the Dutch Houses; a horse
tram service has appeared; and the church tower's small cap has been replaced by a stepped pyramidal
tower, so we've reached 1886 already. We cannot see the corner into Eastgate Street, so we don't know if
it's been rebuilt yet, but the two gables jutting towards the church clock suggest it has. Similarly, the
very last buildings on the left side of the street could be evidence of the 1892 rebuild of that corner.
With neither of these certain, we look to the right where a slender street light adorns the pavement. Chester
had a gasworks by 1817, and gas lights throughout the city by 1831. But this is not the lamp originally
installed (see the St Peter's Church detail above), and the 1890s saw many towns generating electrical
current to power their tramways, street lighting, industries and gradually private houses. So it's
possible we are looking at an early electric light - but as the trams are not yet electric, 1903 is the
latest date. On the
left we have West Side of Bridge Street, showing the Dutch Houses, and
alongside them The Plane Tree, a new building of 1873 that was built in traditional style to fit
in with its neighbours, but was obviously also intended to dominate them with its height and
decoration.The Plane Tree matches the Row height of buildings to the right, rather than the Dutch Houses. This is consistent with its higher floors, but also allows the shops below to be higher and airier. [Grosvenor Museum collection, included in Picturesque Chester. Large print available of this or a similar view (Dutch Houses, Bridge Street).] Below, we have a close-up of the street-level shops from the same painting. The area looks rather more upmarket and better kept than our close-up of Watergate Street did. There is also more sense of shape to the items being sold than in the Bridge Street Row East painting above. The picture can be dated to 1873-9. |
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Next, we have a postcard image kindly supplied by Christopher Proudlove from an item on his own site writeantiques.blogspot.com which includes his own biography of Louise (in his article for Saturday, February 19, 2005). The image is entitled Bridge Street and surely shows the group of buildings at the left of the two monochrome pictures above - but they don't match very well, which is why I've repeated edge strips from those images below for comparison. |
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As we've seen above, the first strip is 1868 or earlier; the second strip is between 1886 and 1903. The
latter shows a wicker-basket shop, much like the postcard - thus linking the postcard more readily with
the later period, and the dress fashions are reasonably in tune with that. The postcard could even be as late as 1910,
when Louise left Chester. With a business directory, it might be possible to pin that down. Warrington Ales,
C.W.Pearce Watch & Clock Maker, the basket shop itself and Mr Nooces Dress Making Rooms on the Row above
the Old Vaults public house are all discernable. Also, by Louise's standards, this would be a relatively easy
painting for someone who was 78 in 1910. The problem (if that's the right word) is the ever-changing frontages, and here we have to bear in mind that Louise produced paintings, not photographs, and she did move things around to improve composition. |
When we look at the postcard, we see two buildings possibly built as a pair, though the joining seems imperfect.
The building to the left has a row built along it, but the staircase to street level isn't obvious. When studying
the right hand building, my eye insists on seeing the upper part flush-fronted with its partner, but the middle
part projected forward like a gallery, pressing down on the shop below. The big rectangular window is clearly
displaced to the left by the viewer's perspective, and both buildings have very prominent timbering.
In the pre-1868 strip (above left), the row building has a flat-top frontage which may be a brick-built false
front. We can see that awkward roof line link from the basket shop, which has apparently not yet taken up that
trade. But the upper window here projects slightly forward of the big middle level window, and they are
clearly in vertical alignment with each other. The plasterwork is crumbling, but still hiding any timbers.The second strip is between 1886 and 1903, and though it shows the basket business seen in the postcard, the building itself has its woodwork decently covered. Again, it doesn't appear to match the postcard in terms of windows - and the building to the left now has a gable front. Without exploring Chester's photographic archives, there are no certainties here, but my guess is that the building has been regressed to an earlier stage in its life, deliberately featuring its wooden structure. And the most likely prompt for this would be the pseudo-Tudor rebuild (fashionable in Victorian times) of the two corners of the street at the Cross in 1888/92. I passed the image to Andy King, who has professional expertise in buildings and he made the following comments: "I agree that it probably originated as a double fronted timber framed building, rendered at an early date, then the left side was modernised and built forward in brick in Georgian days to hide the roof. However, about 1870 the parapet was lowered as styles changed yet again; the roof was extended and a barge board put up, then the right hand shop was extended at ground and first floor level and the whole [lot] given the tudor-bethan timber treatment about 1900. I doubt if the timbering is/was original." An extension at this late stage would explain why no other painting indicates it. Andy also added that taste in art had shifted - not least under the considerable impact of Impressionism - and Louise was meeting this change in later days by softening her images. He thinks the painting may be as late as 1905-10. The section above right is taken from a sketch Louise made around 1865. The full sketch is reproduced on her Wales and West of England page and shows the same view as the sepia-coloured photo above, and may very well have been preliminary work for that painting. This section gives another glance along the east side of the street. |
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At left is a portion of a just-received and lovely view of Bridge Street (which in full extends right up to the
Cross). The original was sold through Christies on 4th Nov 1994 for £13,800, and this part allows us to see a
little bit further down Bridge Street. The period is between 1873 and about 1879. The basket shop is on its corner with Commonhall Street, where the white horse is being led, and the near corner seems to be called Pierpoint Lane, though you can't see quite enough to be certain. The full image is on Louise's biographical page. |
 This street
isn't shown on Baedeker's 1910 map of Chester, but could just be the first few yards of Whitefriars.
We can now see that there is a staircase up to the row half-way along this bit of Bridge Street, and it may be
the only access to it.A wider road junction existed to the left of the buildings in the picture above. At right is an over-enlarged detail from a picture near the head of this page which looks past the buildings we've just discussed and shows the junction marked by its lamp over what is probably a round horse trough. Beyond it to the left, we can see the street sinking down as it becomes Lower Bridge Street. Just a short walk past the horse trough would take us to the Falcon Inn, temporarily reformed as a temperance cocoa house (it became a public house again in the 20th century). If we take the link below for Lower Bridge Street, it's the next building we have a picture of. |
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| Harry Drummond, April 2006. |
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Please take note: we claim no art expertise, and in no way do we offer provenance for
any paintings. What you see here was compiled out of interest in Louise Rayner's paintings and those by
her family, but is based on sometimes very fragmentary evidence. As such, it is inevitable that there
will be errors, though we naturally hope to reduce these over time. We would gratefully receive any information or corrections that will help us to fill the gaps and resolve unproved links - for example confirmation of dates of birth, death, etc., and details of other addresses the family lived at (and roughly when). Images of any of the family's paintings would also be very welcome. Thank you! |
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