ART REVIEW : A Disorienting Look at Old London at the Huntington

I don’t know about you, but I usually start daydreaming about five minutes into most guided tours and travelogues. Names and dates just bounce off the brain unless the guide can tell a good story or conjure up the lively spirits of the dead.

At the Huntington Art Gallery in San Marino, “London in Watercolor” (through Oct. 22) presents a motley group of city views by artists of the 18th and 19th centuries. A few of the artists are famous; most are obscure. But London itself is meant to be the star of this show, and that’s where it lets us down. The images--all drawn from the Huntington’s own collection--are on the wispy and pallid side, and the wall-label commentary is liable to put you to sleep.

Many of the watercolors and drawings show a peaceful tract of open land with drooping trees, a tiny figure or two and--off in the distance--a small, pale view of a famous building, like Buckingham Palace or St. Paul’s. A few represent in a more detailed fashion such hallowed halls as the House of Commons. Rarest of all are those--like John Nixon’s “Skating in St. James’s Park”--that evoke the bubbling social caldron chronicled by England’s famous writers and caricaturists.

The 1784 watercolor includes a wry courtship scene (with waddling Mama dogging the couple’s heels) and images of squat drinkers, merchants setting up camp at the edge of the ice (“Real Air Balloon Gingerbread,” reads one sign) and a black man wearing a princely looking hat.

Edward Dayes’ interior view of Drury Lane Theatre offers a glimpse of audience high jinks during a performance of “Henry IV, Part I.” While Falstaff is robbed onstage, a fight breaks out among patrons in the stalls. Poor things, they had to endure the whole performance on backless wooden benches, under the bored scrutiny of a row of musicians with their backs to the stage.

To be sure, views of specific places you’ve visited also have a certain intrinsic charm. Every tourist who has wandered in the vicinity of the National Gallery, for example, will recognize the church of St.-Martin-in-the-Fields in James Holland’s 1850 view of “Charing Cross by Moonlight.” The rest of the scene has changed enormously, however; as the label explains, Le Sueur’s equestrian statue of Charles I has been moved to the Strand, and Northumberland House was later demolished.

Permeated by class distinctions but (except for the caricatures) either blandly idyllic or routinely descriptive, the works in the show were intended for a broad, essentially undiscriminating market. In the spirit of latter-day consumers keen on glossy calendars and coffee-table books, these folks were keen on travel books and souvenirs of the capital city.

It would have been interesting if the wall labels dealt with the impact of the market on the views artists chose to render, and how faithful a picture of their city they felt able to give. Failing that, it would have been genuinely entertaining--and surely in keeping with the low-key, well-bred tone of the Huntington, a former private residence--if the temper of the times had been evoked with well-selected quotations from period novels and essays.

Instead, the viewer is offered chunks of undigested history--fussy specifics of names and dates minus the broad perspective or human anecdote that builds a bridge between a far-off time and place and the viewer’s own experience.

It makes little sense to drop the name of a major architect like Christopher Wren but not explain his importance for the city, or to list without further identification somebody named Myles Birket Foster in the same breath as Charles Dickens (both of whom were tenants, at different times, of a farm in Hampstead).

If you’re not well-acquainted with London (or even if you are, since a number of the buildings and lookouts pictured here no longer exist or look radically different), you need some orientation. But the show’s sole visual aids--maps of London Then and London Now--are exhibited in such a way that it is impossible to compare one with the other.

The dogged, just-the-facts-ma’am perspective of the show reaches a point of absurdity with a pen-and-watercolor drawing by Thomas Rowlandson, “At Old Kew Bridge.” Rowlandson was a major 18th-Century caricaturist whose apoplectic, bewigged figures ridiculed familiar social types. In this drawing, a small knot of men laugh hysterically as fat horsemen fall off their mounts, one plunging alarmingly off the bridge.

But the brief label reads as though it was written for an engineering society. Who cares who designed the bridge, or when, if we don’t understand what needs it served--and who those proud folk were whom Rowlandson lit into so savagely?