This faded view of a simple stone bridge spanning the river Derwent, near the hamlet of Watendlath, is one of eight watercolours of various sizes that Girtin produced for the well-known collector Sir George Howland Beaumont, 7th Baronet (1753–1827) from the amateur’s own on-the-spot monochrome sketches (see the source image above). Seven of them show scenes in the Lake District, which helped to persuade some earlier writers to erroneously conclude that Girtin himself had visited the popular tourist destination, though in fact they are all copied from sketches made by Beaumont in the summer of 1798, all but one of which are contained in an album now in the collection of the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere. As here, all of the watercolours are considerably larger than the models on which they are based, and they are further united by the fact that, whilst they employ a broader palette than Beaumont’s on-the-spot drawings, they do not significantly depart from the sketch aesthetic of their sources, which means in this case that the underlying pencil work is clearly apparent in places. 

This latter point is worth stressing because it helps to substantiate the manner in which the significance of Beaumont’s role in Girtin’s career has been inflated. The eight sketch-like watercolours commissioned by Beaumont around 1799–1800, though they clearly mark an advance on the amateur’s efforts in terms of spatial veracity and compositional clarity, are collectively the result of no more than a few days’ labour at the most, and they required little imaginative or technical input from the artist. Furthermore, Beaumont’s importance for Girtin’s career has been exaggerated by the persistent myth that the patron owned as many as ‘thirty drawings in water-colours by Girtin’ and that he ‘advised’ his young protégé, John Constable (1776–1837), to ‘study’ them ‘as examples of great breadth and truth’ (Fleming-Williams, 1990, p.77, quoting Leslie, 1845, p.6). The latter part of the statement may indeed be true, but the figure of thirty was almost certainly made up of the eight works discussed here plus the set of twenty Paris aquatints that Beaumont is now known to have acquired in 1803 – that, is after the artist’s death (Smith, 2017–18, p.34, n.63). Far from being the result of Beaumont’s generous patronage, it strikes me that what we might be looking at in this case, as with the other seven watercolour ‘sketches’, is the outcome of a lesson conducted by the professional artist using the amateur’s drawing as the basis of a demonstration of the principles of ‘breadth and truth’. Each of the changes Girtin introduced, ranging from the compression of the composition to the removal of the bush to the right in order to simplify the line of the bank, is nicely calculated to illustrate the principle of breadth. Whether or not the drawing was literally conceived as a lesson, I am sure that it was created in the patron’s home and that Girtin’s practice therefore briefly reverted to something like his earlier employment by other, albeit less talented, amateurs, including Dr Thomas Monro (1759–1833) and James Moore (1762–99).

Although Thomas Girtin (1874–1960) and David Loshak noted that the source drawing is clearly inscribed ‘Wathenlath’ they nonetheless titled the drawing ‘Grange Bridge in Borrowdale’ (Girtin and Loshak, 1954, p.176). This, Tom Girtin (1913-94) noted on a photograph of the two-arched bridge in Borrowdale, was clearly an error and he went on to say that he was increasingly sceptical about his father’s assertion that the artist had travelled on more than one occasion to the Lake District (Girtin Archive, 35). Tom Girtin’s travels in search of the viewpoints adopted by the artist ultimately confirmed his suspicions that works such as TG1330, described by Girtin and Loshak as showing ‘The Gorge of Wathenlath with the Falls of Lodore’ were either misidentified or worked after a sketch by another artist and that he had indeed, unlike almost all of his contemporaries, never visited the Lakes.

1798 - 1799

The Ogwen Falls

TG1330