Works in Public Galleries: V. and A. Museum (Water-Colours); British Museum; National Galleries of Scotland and Ireland; Manchester Whitworth Institute; Ashmolean and Fitzwilliam Museums; Oldham Art Gallery (Charles E. Lees’ Collection).
Biographical and Critical Sources: Edwards’s “Anecdotes”; Dayes’ “Professional Sketches”; Redgrave’s “Century” and “Dictionary”; B.F.A. Club’s Catalogue, 1875; Roget’s “History”; Binyon’s “Life and Works,” 1900; Walpole Society’s Vols. II. and V.
Reproductions: Binyon’s “Life”; Monkhouse’s, Finberg’s, Hughes’s, Lytton’s, and Rich’s works already cited; The Studio (Centenary of Thomas Girtin Number), Nov. 1902; The Studio, May 1916; Walpole Society’s Vols. II. and V.]
Compared with John Cozens’s work Girtin’s appears often self-conscious and artificial. His drawings were admired by his contemporaries chiefly on account of their style; references to the “sword-play” of his pencil, the boldness and swiftness of his washes, constantly recur in their eulogies of his work. Girtin was nearly always a stylist, and often a mannerist. But his style, at its best, is so thoroughly in keeping with the spirit of his work that it is difficult to separate the two. His love of the sweeping lines of the open moorland and his passion for height and space appeal irresistibly to our imagination, while the broad simplicity of his vision, his restrained and truthful colour, and his frank, bold, decisive handling seem the only adequate means by which his inspiration could find clear and authoritative expression.
We must remember, too, that Girtin died at the age of twenty-seven. The knowledge of his early and untimely death intensifies our admiration for all he did; while the few supreme masterpieces of poetical landscape he has left us, like the Plinlimmon, show clearly what our national art lost by the tragedy of his early death.
Girtin seems to have mastered his art as Robert Louis Stevenson mastered his, by “playing the sedulous ape” to the men he admired. There are now in the British Museum copies he made after Antonio Canal, Piranesi, Hearne, Marlow, and Morland. Of these masters Canal seems to have impressed and taught him most. The spaciousness and breadth of effect of all his topographical work are clearly the outcome of his admiration for Canal’s drawings and paintings. The calligraphic quality of his line work, what has been called the “sword-play” of his pencil, is also due to the same influence.
His earlier drawings, made about 1792 and 1793, were, however, modelled on the style of his master, Edward Dayes. The drawings he made after James Moore’s sketches—of which several have been recently acquired by the Ashmolean Museum—might easily be mistaken for Dayes’ work. They only differ in being more accomplished and workmanlike than those which his master made for the same patron, and in their deliberate avoidance of the dark “repoussoir” of which Dayes was so fond in his foregrounds—an avoidance which gives Girtin’s drawings a greater unity and a more decorative effect than those of Dayes.
By about 1795 Girtin’s real style began to assert itself, in drawings like those of Lichfield and Peterborough Cathedrals. From this time we find him pouring forth an abundance of superb topographical subjects instinct with style and ennobled with poetry and imagination—drawings like Rievaulx Abbey (1798), in the V. and A. Museum, Carnarvon Castle, and The Old Ouse Bridge, York, both in the possession of his great-grandson, Mr. Thomas Girtin. The noble studies for his Panorama of London (made probably in 1801), his Lindisfarne (?1797) and Bridgnorth (1802), are fortunately in the British Museum. The drawings he made on his return from Paris, during the last sad months of his fast-ebbing life—drawings like the Porte St. Denis—are amongst the most superb of his splendid productions.
I will close these brief and inadequate remarks by copying out two advertisements connected with Girtin’s “Panorama” which I believe have not been printed or referred to by any one of the writers on his life and work. The first appeared in “The Times” on August 27, 1802. It runs as follows: “Eidometropolis, or Great Panoramic Picture of London, Westminster, and Environs, now exhibiting at the Great Room, Spring Gardens, Admission 1s. T. Girtin returns his most grateful thanks to a generous Public for the encouragement given to his Exhibition, and as it has been conceived to be merely a Picture framed, he further begs leave to request of the Public to notice that it is Panoramic, and from its magnitude, which contains 1944 square feet, gives every object the appearance of being the size of nature. The situation is so chosen as to shew to the greatest advantage the Thames, Somerset House, the Temple Gardens, all the Churches, Bridges, principal Buildings, &c., with the surrounding country to the remotest distance, interspersed with a variety of objects characteristic of the great Metropolis. His views of Paris, etched by himself, are in great forwardness, and to be seen with the Picture as above.”
The second notice is as follows: “Thursday, 11 Nov., 1802. The Public are most respectfully informed that in consequence of the decease of Mr. Thomas Girtin, his Panorama of London exhibiting at Spring Gardens, will be shut till after his interment, when it will be re-opened for the benefit of his widow and children, under the management of his brother, Mr. John Girtin.”