THOMAS GIRTIN (BRITISH 1775-1802)
Somerset House
watercolour in monochrome
10.5 x 12.3 cm

PROVENANCE: With Spink & Son Ltd, St. James London (label attached on the reverse)

Thomas Girtin was an English watercolourist and etcher, known friend and rival of J. M. W. Turner. He was born in Southwark and as a boy he attended drawing classes with Thomas Malton, an English painter of topographical and architectural views, who had among his pupils also J. M. W. Turner. Girtin later was an apprentice of the watercolourist and engraver Edward Dayes and since 1794 he started to exhibit at the Royal Academy and to produce works for influential private patrons such as Lady Sutherland and Sir George Beaumont. Between 1801 and 1802, he spent six months in Paris where he painted watercolours which he then engraved when he came back to London and were published posthumously as Twenty Views in Paris and its Environs. In the same year he produced he "Eidometropolis", a 5.5 metres high and 33 metres in circumference panorama of London. He died due to his precarious health at 27 years old.
Turner and Girtin changed the art of watercolour which moved from a careful stained landscape to a more dramatic and bolder way of depicting the lights and the weather effects. This new romantic style was for a brief period the epitome of modern art and Turner and Girtin were the two leading figures of this change. Turner remarked the premature death of Girtin with these words: "Had Tom Girtin lived I should have starved."

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