Thomas GIRTIN
Southwark 1775 - London 1802
Biography
One of the founders of the 19th century watercolour tradition in Britain, Thomas Girtin was born in London, the son of a brushmaker, and in 1789 was apprenticed to the topographical draughtsman Edward Dayes. Like Dayes, he was later employed by the antiquarian and amateur artist James Moore, and in 1794, at the age of nineteen, he exhibited a watercolour for the first time at the Royal Academy; a view of Ely Cathedral commissioned by Moore. Between 1794 and 1797 he also was one of the artists who attended the informal academy established by Dr. Thomas Monro, alongside his close friend from youth J. M. W. Turner, whose early career was paralleled and strongly influenced by Girtin. From the middle of the 1790s Girtin undertook sketching expeditions, sometimes accompanied by Turner, to the Midlands, Sussex, the Scottish borders, Devon, Dorset and Yorkshire, all of which resulted in a series of watercolours which established his later reputation. He developed a particular penchant for architectural subjects, and produced many finished watercolours of notable churches, abbeys, castles and cathedrals in England, the Scottish borders and North Wales. Although he is known to have produced a handful of oil paintings, none have survived to the present day.
Girtin had a very short independent career of only some ten years before his early death. He became known in particular for his depictions of country houses, and among his clients were the Earls of Elgin and Essex, Sir George Beaumont, The Hon. Spencer Cowper and Lord Mulgrave. From 1798 onwards Girtin’s chief patron was Edward Lascelles of Harewood House in Yorkshire, where the artist has a room of his own in which to work. He produced a large circular painted panorama of London, which he called the ‘Eidometropolis’, which was completed and exhibited in 1802 but has since been lost, although a number of related drawings are in the British Museum. Girtin may have planned another, similar panorama of Paris, and made a brief visit to the city in 1801; twenty views of the French capital were published as aquatints the year after his death. Girtin died suddenly and prematurely, perhaps from an asthma attack, in 1802, at the age of just twenty-seven, and is buried in the church of St. Paul’s in Covent Garden.
The scarcity of his work has meant that Girtin was, for many years after his death, largely unappreciated, although an exhibition of his oeuvre was mounted by the Burlington Fine Arts Club in London in 1875. Writing almost a hundred years after the artist’s death, the English poet, dramatist and scholar Lawrence Binyon, in his essay Thomas Girtin: His Life and Works, published in 1900, noted that ‘The name of Girtin has scarcely, I imagine, ever travelled beyond the borders of Britain. Even in his own country he is little more than a name. He suffers, doubtless, with other water-colour artists, from the lack of opportunity for being seen and studied. Let us hope that when the centenary of 1802 comes around, it may be found possible to organize an exhibition of his drawings. To many such an exhibition would be a revelation.’ In the end, it was another century before such a major exhibition devoted to Girtin’s work was held; at Tate Britain on the 200th anniversary of the artist’s death in 2002.
