Oil painting, signed and dated lower right 'Corny Wagner / London 96'. 'Atlas 1' was a coaling derrick or pontoon operated from 1862 in the Port of London by William Cory and Sons - one of the largest importers of coal on the Thames. It was a double-ended vessel 250 feet long by 90 feet wide and was originally built for salvage work by the Thames Ironworks for the Patent Derrick Company. This became insolvent before delivery and its was sold instead to Cory's, converted to tranship coal using steam-driven derricks, from sea-going colliers alongside into river barges and lighters, mainly by the shutes visible here. The advantage of such a vessel was that colliers could thus discharge in the river, without having to wait for the tide in order to dock conventionally. At a time when various ways rapid transhipment of coal were being developed, not least by the Royal Navy, 'Atlas 1' was the first facility able to move a ton a minute. In 1865 it was joined by 'Atlas II', both being moored in Bugsby's Reach between Greenwich and Woolwich, which is presumably the location shown here, looking west at sunset. They were still in use in 1901 but appear to have been replaced by newer pontoons further downstream by 1915. (A technically informative early model of 'Atlas 1', now in the Merseyside Maritime Museum, is discussed in a note by A.H. Hudson in the 'Mariners' Mirror, vol. 70, no. 3 (1984), pp. 325-27.)

Cornelius Wagner (1870-1956) was a German landscape and marine painter born in Dresden, who studied at the Dusseldorf Academy until 1895 and became a prolific and successful painter, including of works for public buildings. He made extended tours to the West Indies (1897) and Argentina (1904) and in 1906 settled in Kaiserwerth, Dusseldorf, until 1955, when he retired to Lake Starnberg. He was particularly interested in painting water, his work including ports (especially Hamburg), jetties, ships and shipyards, the Rhine and the German northern lakes. He only took part in a small number of largely German exhibitions, and one in Zurich, mainly before the First World War but in 1959 the Dusseldorf Art Association mounted a retrospective of his work of the period 1889-1949. There are many examples in German collections but few in Britain, though he clearly visited England: apart from this early picture of the industrial Thames, the Museum also has a view of the Thames or Medway barge 'Cerf' on the River Crouch, Essex, dated 1937 (BHC4169). He exhibited just once at the Royal Academy annual exhibition in London, in 1910, showing a British coastal subject entitled 'Low-tide work' which is now in Oldham Art Gallery.