THOMAS GIRTIN (1774)

Arstist who at the turn of the 19th century firmly established the aesthetic autonomy of watercolour (formerly used mainly to colour engravings) by employing its transparent washes to evoke a new sense of atmospheric space.

While still boys he and his friend J.M.W. Turner were employed in copying works by the 18th-century painter John Robert Cozens.

Girtin went on numerous sketching tours, chiefly in the north of England and founded a sketching club for young artists.

During 1801-02 he visited Paris and produced a series of etchings of that city. His gigantic panorama of London the Eidometropolis was eshibited inn 1802 before his premature death.

Girtin´s earlier landscapes are in the 18th-century topographical manner but in his last years he evolved a bold, spacious and Romantic style -in spirit akin to the contemporary poetry of Wordsworth- that greatly influenced English landscape painting.

The increasing power of such late works as The White House, Chelsea (1800; Tate Gallery, LOndon) lends some crdence to Turner´s supposed remark: "If Tom Girtin had lived I should have starved".