Oil painting, signed lower left, forming one of a group on panel (BHC0649-BHC0652) previously misidentified as the Coronation procession of June 1911. This has now been rectified from location of the Museum acquisition correspondence which shows all four were a gift of the artist in 1936 and stated by him in his offer to be 'sketches of the Naval and Mercantile Pageant on the Thames after the Great War'; in short, the Peace Pageant of 1919 which was deliberately timed to mark the fifth anniversary of the war's outbreak (4 August) following formal conclusion of the post-war peace at the Versailles conference earlier in the summer. Why the occasion was subsequently re-identified is unclear especially as there was no Coronation river procession. Here the view is downstream, from the Battersea (south) side, with Chelsea (Grosvenor) railway bridge seen behind old Chelsea Bridge (demolished and replaced in 1935-37). The white-hulled barge leading the procession from the City is Queen Mary's shallop (1689) carring George V and Queen Mary. This event was the last voyage of the shallop. Subsequently stored at Windsor, it was offered to the proposed National Maritime Museum by George V in 1930 and eventually came to Greenwich for restoration and display in 1953.

From : http://www.thamesdiamondjubileepageant.org/Pageants.htm (accessed 12 July 2011): ' In 1919, the Thames Peace Pageant celebrated the efforts of English mariners and merchant seamen in WWI. The five-mile procession from London Bridge to Chelsea, combining royal and civic pageantry, attracted enormous crowds to the river banks, bridges and the Thames itself. The Royal Barge, called the Queen’s Shallop, made her final voyage as part of this pageant. She was the last of the old state barges.

The Queen’s Shallop took centre stage, closely followed by the Lords of the Admiralty in a ten-oared cutter, each accompanied by a steamboat. A green steam barge carried the Lord Mayor, following which were a dozen twelve-oared Navy cutters, four Navy picket boats with guns, an armed motor launch and a barge displaying guns used in the Great War. The main body of the procession featured flagged and decorated craft from maritime institutions and the British Merchant Service.

Décor consisted of bunting and 50’[ft] streamers, decking the bridges, ships, wharves, cranes and scaffolding. Choirs sang sea songs on the Embankment and bands played along the bank and at the piers where King George V entered and disembarked the royal barge. At Cadogan Pier the King disembarked to survey the pageant and receive the salute. Above the saluting point the procession turned and returned eastward.'

The above appears accurately to describe the vessels shown. Another very similar signed sketch by Lawson (235 x 335 mm) is in the Royal Collection. It bears a label written by Queen Mary identifying it as the 'Victory Procession on the Thames, 1919' but how it was acquired is not known, (although Queen Mary had a reputation for expressing a liking for things and thus encouraging their gift).

Cecil Constant Philip Lawson was the son of Cecil Gordon Lawson (1849-82) landscape painter, and his wife, Constance (1854-1929), daughter of the sculptor John Birnie Philip. Cecil junior was educated at Charterhouse and spent many early years in Paris, where he exhibited at the Salon, played football for the Sporting Club de Paris and joined a large circle of military artists among whom he developed a distinctive style of military painting. Shortly before the First World War he joined the Westminster Dragoons and with them served in Egypt and Palestine. In 1919 he was commissioned in the Army Service Corps but left the army in 1920. As a painter he exhibited at the International Society, the Royal Academy and the Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts between 1913 and 1923. Between the wars he began his life work of writing and illustrating the 'History of Uniforms of the British Army', to run parallel with Fortescue's multi-volume history of the army itself. Lawson's first two volumes appeared in 1940/41 but the Second World War and post-war austerity delayed publication of the next until 1961. Volume 4 appeared in 1966, with the fifth at the publishers at the time of his death on 17 March 1967, just before his 87th birthday. At that time he was well advanced on volume 6 and in 1933 he also published and illustrated a useful and attractive anthology of naval songs and ballads. Lawson was a pioneer of serious research into military uniforms and publication on them. He was also very knowledgeable on Imperial and Commonwealth armies and foreigh troops in British pay. In old age he took great interest in the creation of the National Army Museum and his library and archive of notes and sketches is preserved there. A brief obituary in the 'Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research' (vol XLV, 1967, p.121) also pays tribute to 'his dry sense of humour and irreverence for modern developments in warfare'.