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Cremorne Gardens were popular pleasure gardens by the side of the River Thames in Chelsea, London. They lay between Chelsea Harbour and the end of the King's Road and flourished between 1845 to 1877; today only a vestige survives, on the river at the southern end of Cheyne Walk. ==History== Originally the property of the Earl of Huntingdon (c. 1750), father of Steele's Aspasia, who built a mansion here, the property passed through various hands into those of the Irish Peer, Thomas Dawson, Baron Dartrey and Viscount Cremorne (1725–1813), who greatly beautified it. The name Cremorne is from the peer's seat in County Monaghan which is still known as the Barony of Cremorne, and is an Anglicisation of what in modern Gaelic is Crìoch Mhùrn. This means the Bounds of Mourne, from the territorial domain of an ancient clan or sept called Mughdorna in Old Irish. The name is cognate with the Mountains of Mourne. The property was subsequently sold and converted into a proprietary place of entertainment and spectacle, being popular as such from 1845 to 1877. The Cremorne Gardens occupied a large site running between the Thames and the King's Road. Opened in 1845, they were noisy and colourful pleasure gardens featuring restaurants, entertainments, dancing and balloon ascents, and could be entered from the north gate on Kings Road or another by the Cremorne Pier on the river. The famous artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler painted several nocturnes of Cremorne Gardens between 1872 and 1877. He was a resident of Cheyne Walk, a mere few hundred yards from the Gardens. His painting Cremorne Gardens No 2 is full of fashionable and active figures and parallels to some extent the ‘modern life’ paintings of his French associates Manet and Tissot with whom he was in close contact during the early 1870s. Cremorne Gardens was doubtless a most attractive location, not only for its light displays but also for the brilliant array of fashionable people who gathered there. They provided the setting for Nocturne in Black and Gold: the Firewheel and Nocturne in Black and Gold: the Falling Rocket of c.1874, the latter resulting in the Whistler versus Ruskin trial of 1878. Walter Greaves was the son of a Chelsea boat-builder who used to ferry Turner across the river; Walter and his brother Harry also performed the same service for Whistler, and in about 1863 became his unpaid studio assistants and pupils. They adored Whistler, accompanied him wherever he went, imitated his dress and manner, made the frames for his canvases, bought his materials and prepared his colours. Walter said; “He taught us to paint, and we taught him the waterman’s jerk”. Their close association lasted well into the 1890s, Whistler favouring Walter as he was the more gifted of the two brothers. Two of his most successful images were Regatta at Hammersmith Bridge and Chelsea under Snow; like Whistler he concentrated on areas around the Thames. He died in poverty, having been taken in by the Charterhouse. Greaves chooses to depict Whistler near the Crystal Platform. A reporter in the Illustrated London News (30 May 1857) admired the structure’s “inclosing ironwork...enriched, by Defries and Son, with devices in emerald and garnet cut-glass drops, and semicircles of lustre and gas jets, which have a most brilliant effect.” The pavilion was about three hundred and sixty feet in circumference. It was encrusted with ornamental pillars, gas jets, and over forty plate-glass mirrors in black frames. In the upper portion of the pagoda (seen here), where the orchestra played, there were seventeen gas lit chandeliers. This particular feature of the Gardens was clearly a favourite with Greaves as he chose to depict it on several occasions, for example The Dancing Platform, Cremorne Gardens (1870s) and in an etching of this period, which depicts the same view as Whistler in the Cremorne Gardens. In the former Whistler is depicted as the natty flaneur, striding along with and yet separate from the crowd. In the latter Whistler is seated but maintains the image of flaneur, the impartial, non-judgmental observer of contemporary life. He leans to one side to acknowledge a fellow dandy, much to the impatience of the young woman who stands at his table. Cremorne Gardens rapidly acquired a reputation as the territory of the demi-monde frequented by women of questionable morals. His associate could buy such a woman; this is implied by his indifference towards her, the attention of the passing woman as well as the undisguised stare of the gentleman at the railing. Whistler and the Greaves family were frequent visitors before the gardens closed in 1877. Cremorne Gardens never acquired the fashionable fame of Vauxhall Gardens, and finally became so great an annoyance to some of the more influential residents in the neighbourhood that a renewal of its licence was refused, and most of the site of the gardens was soon built over. The name survives in Cremorne Road. Donald James Wheal, in his first-person memoir of life in working-class Chelsea, (World's End ) gives a lively account of the almost-forgotten history and destruction of Cremorne Gardens. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Cremorne Gardens, London」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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