The Landscape by Thomas Girtin

August 4, 2009

Girtin, during his short career, had no selfish ideas of keeping his knowledge of painting to himself. It was mainly due to his initiation that a club was started amongst a small body of young artists for the study of landscape painting. They met at each other’s houses in rotation. One of its prominent members was Sir Robert Ker Porter, a painter, traveller and author, who afterwards married a Russian princess. He was living, at the time, at 16, Great Newport Street, which had formerly been a residence of Sir Joshua Reynolds, and subsequently that of Dr. Samuel Johnson. It was in this house that the first meeting of the club was held “for the purpose of establishing by practice a School of Historic Landscape, the subjects being designs from poetick passages.” Writing in The Somerset House Gazette, in 1823, W. H. Pyne, under the pseudonym of Ephraim Hardcastle, states “this artist (Girtin) prepared his drawings on the same principle which had hitherto been confined to painting in oil, namely, with local colour, and shadowing the same with the individual tint of its own shadow. Previous to the practice of Turner and Girtin, drawings were shadowed first entirely throughout, whatever their component parts—houses, castles, trees, mountains, fore-grounds, middle-grounds, and distances, all with black or grey, and these objects were afterwards stained or tinted, enriched and finished, as is now the custom to colour prints. It was this new practice, introduced by these distinguished artists, that acquired for designs in water colour upon paper the title of paintings: a designation which many works of the existing school decidedly merit, as we lately beheld in the Exhibition of the Painters in Water Colours, where pictures of this class were displayed in gorgeous frames, bearing out in effect against the mass of glittering gold as powerfully as pictures in oil.” Girtin had a partiality for 5 painting in a low tone of colour and frequently on rough cartridge paper, which assisted in giving a largeness of manner to his work. The Landscape is, however, rendered in a brighter key than his usual practice.