John Thomas Stanley, 1st Baron Stanley of Alderley (1766–1850), visited Iceland in 1789 and on his return commissioned Nicholas Pocock (1740–1821), Philip Reinagle (1749–1833) and Girtin’s master, Edward Dayes (1763–1804), to work up his drawings. The expedition followed the precedent set by Stanley’s friend the eminent botanist Sir Joseph Banks (1743–1820), who had made a pioneering visit to the island in 1772 accompanied by the artists John Cleveley the Younger (1747–86) and James Miller (active 1773–1814). As a way of supplementing the drawings Stanley had commissioned from his own on-the-spot sketches, he employed the fifteen-year-old Girtin to make copies of some of Banks’ Icelandic subjects, either borrowing them or sending the young apprentice to the home of his friend in Soho Square. Many of the copies, such as Mount Hekla, with Sir Joseph Banks and His Party Descending from the Volcano (TG0005), were inscribed by Stanley with the date, ‘1790’, and identified as copied by ‘T. Gurton’ with the ‘Cooperation of Sir Joseph Banks’.

1790

Mount Hekla, with Sir Joseph Banks and His Party Descending from the Volcano

TG0005