Thanet History and Photos of a Margate Art Afternoon

Some boats in Ramsgate Harbour around 1900 most of these would either be colliers bring coal for heat and the gasworks, for light and of course fishing boats.

This collier looks about 1920

Mist, fog, steam or all three makes this Ramsgate one a bit ghostly.

Diving gear in Ramsgate probably around 1920

This Margate passenger steamboat from London looks to be very early, around when the steamboats bringing mass tourism started in 1815

1907 postmark so before then

This post is mainly for my customers where I work at Michael's Bookshop in Ramsgate so a picture of our local history books this morning.

On to my Sunday off yesterday I woke up thinking about the pioneering photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. After having made some coffee, gone back to bed and used my phone to look at a lot of his photos, I did a quick watercolour sketch based on this one.

Like so many of the photos online, there is no title, in this case just the date 1932 which sounds about right.

Here is the watercolour sketch 

I got out the closest camera I have to one that Henri Cartier-Bresson would have used and set off to Margate on Sunday afternoon. The plan was to look at art galleries in the way a tourist would who had turned up and found nothing much at Turner Contemporary as the exhibitions are being changed over, the new one opening at the weekend.

So first Benjamin Senior at Carl Freedman Gallery, all photos will expand with a bit of clicking or tapping.

On to the old town

Anthony Giles Gallery

David Mullet 

Back to Ramsgate with not much daylight left so I did a quick sketch, influenced by what I'd seen, from Wetherspoons.

Where I work at Michael's Bookshop in Ramsgate we have the largest range of affordable art books in Kent so we do get to see a lot of artists anyway.

This is the link to pictures of the newly arrived books

 So if you've actually got this far I guess you deserve something or other. How did we do in Margate? Well to be honest pretty well, we went to look at art and there was a lot to see a lot we didn't see, we came away feeling we had got a decent afternoon and seen a lot of interesting pictures.