Gerald Callcott Horsley

Gerald Horsley spent his days sketching the city like a human camera, stopping mid-walk to press pencil to paper outside a shop or up a church aisle. He drew the same brick arches, crooked rooflines, and soot-stained cornices again and again, as though trying to memorize London’s pulse in pencil strokes. You’ll recognize his exact view of the zig-zag roof over the Strand façade of St Mary-le-Strand if you stand on the pavement and look up, every finial and downspout caught in the same dry, light hand he used for 30 years.