This article is taken from the February 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
Thomas Girtin was born 250 years ago this year and his short life offers one of the great counterfactuals of British art. His friend JMW Turner was also born in 1775, and the careers of the two young painters emerged in tandem.
When Girtin died in 1802 aged 27, Turner, always a man with a prickly but profound sense of his own worth, nevertheless ceded ground, confessing: “Had poor Tom lived, I would have starved.” He spoke whilst moved by emotion and in the spirit of nil nisi bonum, but there was something more in his words.
At the time of Girtin’s death — usually ascribed to an asthma attack but according to his one-time teacher Edward Dayes a demise exemplifying the “fatal consequences of vice” — it was he more than Turner who had done most to show the possibilities of watercolour and establish it as a medium worthy of serious artists.
Turner went on to reveal its expressive and emotional potential and whether Girtin would have been so radical is debatable, but with his White House at Chelsea, 1800, he had already created perhaps the most harmonious picture in the British watercolour canon — a quietly innovative and wholly mellifluous poem in blue wash. This picture offers other clues as to his trajectory. Its low horizon, with water and sky complementing one another and dry land reduced to a filament, shows that he was already interested in horizontality.
In 1800 Girtin produced a monotone watercolour view of Bolton Abbey in Yorkshire which the following year he turned into a fully coloured scene, complete with decorous cattle. He treated the distant architecture with care but it was the sweep of the valley that really interested him — his brush clearly moving side to side.
When, in 1809, Turner painted the view he closed in on the ruins themselves, framing them with trees, filling the vista with foliage and detailing everything with intricacy. Here were two demonstrations not just of what watercolour could do but in how to look at a landscape.
Girtin and Turner were brought up near one another — Girtin in Aldersgate, Turner in Covent Garden — and both came from the artisanal class (hair featured in both family businesses: Girtin’s father was a brush maker, Turner’s a barber). They met as boys when they trained in landscape painting at the evening academy of Dr Thomas Monro. There they frequently collaborated on pictures; Girtin drew the outlines and Turner “washed in the effects”.
Turner was first to exhibit at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, in 1790, with Girtin’s debut coming four years later. Both forged early careers with watercolours showing castles and other antiquarian buildings, but where they differed was in oil paintings: Turner would make oil his primary focus whilst Girtin produced just one known work in the medium.
What Girtin’s art would have become had the Academicians not rejected him for associate membership of the RA in 1801 — he won not one vote — is one of the many imponderables that surround him.
A further significant failure was to follow. In an attempt to break new ground, Girtin took his interest in horizontality to new lengths and created what he called his Eidometropolis — a 360-degree panorama of London as seen from the roof of Albion Terrace next to Blackfriars Bridge.
Panoramas had proved a remunerative form of art in Paris where large numbers of the public paid to enter a special rotunda and view Pierre Prévost’s View of Paris from the Tuileries Gardens: Girtin wanted to do something similar in London.
Using a perspective frame (a square divided by a string grid) he made a series of detailed drawings, some of which he coloured, which were passed on to scene-painter assistants to transfer to canvas. The result, when the images were joined together, was a colossal canvas 108 feet long and 18 feet high that gave not just a view of the capital’s skyline punctuated by a host of spires and towers, but a vista of clouds and atmospherics — smoke, storm clouds, shafts of sunlight.
The venture proved a failure, as did the attempt to show the panorama in Paris at the onset of the Peace of Amiens. The painting itself is lost, probably during a fire in Paris, but Girtin’s original pictures remain, most in the British Museum.
Some of Girtin’s contemporaries claimed he was feckless and hinted at radical sympathies, heavy drinking and “sensual indulgence”. Others said he was assiduous and devoted to art to the point of sitting on damp ground to paint, which contributed to his final illness, then demanding that painting materials be brought to him on his deathbed.
Turner outlived Girtin by nearly 50 years and went through multiple artistic phases. Girtin’s essays in burgeoning Romanticism were cut short: it may have been a blessing, since watercolour was ultimately a small-scale medium, but what survives of his art suggests a new and affecting vision of nature was prematurely lost with him.
