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Works Thomas Girtin and Joseph Mallord William Turner after John Robert Cozens

A Distant View of Civita Castellana

1794 - 1797

Primary Image: TG0645: Thomas Girtin (1775–1802) and Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851), after John Robert Cozens (1752–97), A Distant View of Civita Castellana, 1794–97, graphite and watercolour on wove paper, on an early mount, 27.7 × 17.9 cm, 10 ⅞ × 7 in. Tate, Turner Bequest CCCLXXIV, 10 (D36487).

Photo courtesy of Tate (All Rights Reserved)

Artist's source: John Robert Cozens (1752–97), A View at Civita Castellana, graphite on laid paper, 22.5 × 17.1 cm, 8 ⅞ × 6 ¾ in. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection (B1977.14.4431).

Photo courtesy of Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection (Public Domain)

Description
Creator(s)
Thomas Girtin (1775-1802) and Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) after John Robert Cozens (1752-1797)
Title
  • A Distant View of Civita Castellana
Date
1794 - 1797
Medium and Support
Graphite and watercolour on wove paper, on an early mount
Dimensions
27.7 × 17.9 cm, 10 ⅞ × 7 in
Mount Dimensions
36.8 × 48 cm, 14 ½ × 18 ⅞ in
Inscription

‘Part of Civita Castellana between Narni & Rome’ on the mount lower left, in a later hand (presumably transcribing Girtin's no longer visible inscription)

Part of
Object Type
Collaborations; Monro School Copy
Subject Terms
Italian View: Roman Campagna

Collection
Catalogue Number
TG0645
Description Source(s)
Viewed in November 2017

Provenance

Dr Thomas Monro (1759–1833); his posthumous sale, Christie's, 28 June 1833, lot 79 as ‘Twenty-six sketches in Switzerland and Italy, by Turner, in blue and Indian ink, in a scrap-book’; bought by Thomas Griffith for Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851), £10 10s; accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest, 1856

Bibliography

Finberg, 1909, vol.2, p.1232 as '"Part of Civita Castellana, between Narni & Rome"' by Thomas Girtin; Bell and Girtin, 1935, p.39; Turner Online as 'A View at Civita Castellana' by Joseph Mallord William Turner and Thomas Girtin (Accessed 08/09/2022); Insalaco, 2018–19, pp.34–35

About this Work

This view across the gorge of the river Treia to the hilltop town of Civita Castellana in central Italy and the church of Santa Maria del Arco is mounted in an album of watercolours bought by Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) at the posthumous sale of Dr Thomas Monro (1759–1833) (Exhibitions: Christie’s, 28 June 1833, lot 79). The twenty-six drawings were the outcome of a unique collaboration between Girtin and Turner working together at Monro’s London home at the Adelphi. Here the artists were employed across three winters, probably between 1794 and 1797, to make ‘finished drawings’ from the ‘Copies’ of the ‘outlines or unfinished drawings of Cozens’ and other artists, amateur and professional, either from Monro’s collection or lent for the purpose. As the two young artists later recalled, Girtin generally ‘drew in outlines and Turner washed in the effects’. ‘They went at 6 and staid till Ten’, which may account for the generally monochrome appearance of the works, and, as the diarist Joseph Farington (1747–1821) reported, Turner received ‘3s. 6d each night’, though ‘Girtin did not say what He had’ (Farington, Diary, 12 November 1798).1

Monro’s posthumous sale, in 1833, contained only twenty or so sketches by John Robert Cozens (1752–97), so the patron must have borrowed the majority of the ‘outlines or unfinished drawings’ copied by Girtin and Turner. In this case, the source of the watercolour, a sketch inscribed ‘Part of Civita Castellana – between Narni & Rome’ (see the image above), was almost certainly purchased at the sale of ‘Mr COZENS’ in July 1794 by Sir George Beaumont (1753–1827).2 As Kim Sloan has noted, Beaumont mounted ‘215 “tracings” or drawings on oiled paper’ in an album that he presumably lent to Monro and it was from this collection, now at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, that the two young artists produced more than fifty watercolours (Sloan and Joyner, 1993, pp.89–91). The drawing on which this watercolour is based is inscribed ‘KK 38’, and, although it is not known what this stands for, the forty sketches marked in this way all seem to have been made by Cozens during his stay in and around Rome from November 1776 through to March 1779. None of the compositions in this group were realised as watercolours by Cozens, and this possibly encouraged Monro to commission a finished work for his collection.

The album containing this drawing was sold in 1833 as the work of Turner, but the cataloguer of the Turner Bequest, Alexander Finberg, thought that Girtin alone was responsible for many of the watercolours, whilst more recently Andrew Wilton has established their joint authorship (Finberg, 1909, vol.2, p.1232; Wilton, 1984a, pp.8–23). Identifying the division of labour within Monro School drawings is considerably helped, as here, when the colour washes leave much of the pencil work showing through, and areas such as the buildings on the horizon are untouched. The quality of Girtin’s pencil work is not of the highest standard, however, being hard and unvarying, and Turner’s washes are also comparatively slight; indeed, there are signs that the watercolour was simply not completed – or, perhaps more accurately, was not taken to its usual level of finish. In general, I am inclined to believe that such a falling off of standards in the Monro School subjects resulted from time pressures placed on Girtin and Turner, rather than indicating the intervention of other, anonymous hands in the work. Moreover, the poor quality of a given watercolour, in itself, does not indicate that it departed from the division of labour that the two artists themselves described to Farington in 1798.

by Greg Smith

Place depicted

Footnotes

  1. 1 The full diary entry, giving crucial details of the artists’ work at Monro’s house, is transcribed in the Documents section of the Archive (1798 – Item 2).
  2. 2 A full record of the sale is available in the Documents section of the Archive (1794 – Item 1)

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