Topography of a Painting: Carel Weight’s Holborn Circus, 1947

Abstract

In the modern era, London’s streetscape changes with great rapidity as buildings are demolished and replaced. Carel Weight’s painting, Holborn Circus, 1947, records that fallow period between bombsite and rebuilding that often lasted for years after the war, but now is often only a matter of weeks. Weight had not long returned from ten months in Europe as an official war artist when he painted the scene around Holborn Circus from a friend’s studio flat. It is an image of a London past: almost nothing in this painting still exists, and the streetscape has changed more than once since the 1940s. While there is nothing especially innovative about the painting, it addresses our nostalgia for what was and is no more through the vision of an artist tempered by experience of war-ravaged Italian cities. This article situates Weight’s painting in the context of other depictions of London after the war and describes the fundamental changes to the area wrought by widespread demolition and reconstruction in the post-war era.