- Description
-
- Creator(s)
- (?) Thomas Girtin (1775-1802)
- Title
-
- A Pantry or Kitchen Interior
- Date
- 1795 - 1796
- Medium and Support
- Graphite on wove paper (watermark: J WHATMAN)
- Dimensions
- 29.2 × 19.6 cm, 11 ½ × 7 ¾ in
- Inscription
‘Thos Girtin’ lower right, by (?) Thomas Girtin
- Object Type
- Outline Drawing
- Subject Terms
- Picturesque Vernacular
-
- Collection
- Catalogue Number
- TG1520
- Description Source(s)
- Auction Catalogue
Provenance
Sotheby’s, 13 July 1989, lot 18 as 'A Pantry', unsold; Christie’s, South Kensington, 28 March 2002, lot 67 as 'A kitchen interior', £1,880
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Stags Fighting amongst a Herd of Deer in Windsor Great Park, with the Castle in the Distance
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A Herd of Deer in Richmond Park
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A Panoramic View of the Thames from the Adelphi Terrace, Section One: Somerset House to Blackfriars Bridge
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A Panoramic View of the Thames from the Adelphi Terrace, Section Two: The Surrey Bank
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A Panoramic View of the Thames from the Adelphi Terrace, Section Three: Westminster Bridge to York Stairs
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A Haystack on a Farm, on the Road to Harrow-on-the-Hill
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St James’s Park, with Westminster Abbey in the Distance
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St Paul’s Cathedral, from St Martin’s-le-Grand
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St Paul's Cathedral, from St Martin’s-le-Grand
Untraced Works

St Paul’s Cathedral, from St Martin’s-le-Grand
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St Paul’s Cathedral, from St Martin’s-le-Grand
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

A River Scene, with Boats
Victoria and Albert Museum, London

An Imaginary Coast Scene with the Horizontal Air Mill at Battersea
Hawes Fine Art

London: The Leathersellers’ Hall
British Museum, London

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British Museum, London

Pinckney’s Farm, Radwinter
Victoria and Albert Museum, London

A Farm with an Unidentified Windmill
Private Collection

Barns and a Pond, Said to Be near Bromley
Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence

Barns and a Pond, Said to Be near Bromley
Private Collection, Norfolk

Trees and Pond, Said to Be near Bromley
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

A Sandpit, near Logs Hill, Widmore
Private Collection

A Sandpit, near Logs Hill, Widmore
Private Collection

The Church of St Mary the Virgin, Stone-next-Dartford
British Museum, London

A Farmhouse in a Woodland Setting, Said to Be in Devon
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

Farm Buildings, Probably in Surrey
The Whitworth, University of Manchester

A House Seen across a Lake, Known as ‘The Mill-Pond’
Private Collection

A Picturesque House Overlooking a River, with Distant Windmills
Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University, Bloomington

The West End of an Unidentified Church
Private Collection

An Unidentified Windmill, Probably in Lambeth
Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation, Houston

Unidentified Buildings, Herne Hill
The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens, San Marino

Study of a Sailor on Board a Ship; A Fishing Boat
Private Collection

The Frozen Watermill, from William Cowper's The Task
The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens, San Marino

An Unidentified Subject, Probably from James Macpherson’s Poems of Ossian
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The Eruption of Mount Vesuvius
The Morgan Library & Museum

The Archangel Gabriel Awaiting Night, from John Milton's Paradise Lost
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Portrait Study of a Man, Said to Be the Artist George Barret the Younger
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A Study of a Lion from the Tower of London
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British Museum, London

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The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens, San Marino

A Landscape with Figures by Railings
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Self-Portrait of the Artist at Work
British Museum, London

An Unidentified Landscape, with a Church amongst Trees
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

A Cottage and a Windmill Surrounded by Trees
Private Collection

St Paul’s Cathedral, from the Thames
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About this Work
When this uncharacteristic interior scene last appeared at auction in 2002, it was suggested that it might be a study for a view of Stokesay Castle (see figure 1) that was formerly in the collection of Tom Girtin (1913–94). The pencil drawing, which was catalogued by Susan Morris as Stokesay Castle: Interior of a Raftered Hall and dated to around 1800, turns out not to be by Girtin, however, and neither does it depict Stokesay in Shropshire (Morris, 1986, p.45). A small oil by John Varley (1778–1842), The Interior of the Blackmoor Head, near Rhuddlan (see figure 2), illustrates the same scene, and, indeed, it is almost certainly based on the pencil sketch (at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven), so closely does it follow each of the meticulously recorded details of the inn scene in North Wales. The question then is should this pantry scene also be attributed to Varley? Sadly, I missed the work when it last appeared in public and I only know it from this digital image, but the signature certainly looks to be genuine, and there is arguably just enough variation in the touch to suggest that the drawing might be by Girtin. It is certainly true that the artist’s use of line is uncharacteristically sharp, perhaps suggesting an early date. However, with no comparable subject against which to judge the drawing, the attribution to Girtin cannot finally be confirmed with any degree of certainty.
The question of the attribution would no doubt be considerably eased if we knew something about the circumstances of the work’s production, and specifically why it was, just in this case, that Girtin chose to sketch in some detail a humble domestic interior that might normally be of interest only to a genre painter. Examining the range of kitchen scenes produced at this time by artists such as Francis Wheatley (1747–1801) and William Redmore Bigg (1755–1828), one is struck by how much more detail is included in this pencil sketch, so that if the drawing is by Girtin then it appears not to have been copied from another source and, following on from this, there is therefore a chance that it was sketched from life. This, in turn, raises another issue, because one of the common tropes of the early biographical accounts of Girtin is that, as a man of the people, he favoured the kitchen over the fashionable salon. William Henry Pyne (1770–1843), for instance, claimed that ‘in search of the picturesque, he sought the kitchen of the inn for refreshment, where he might enjoy himself without sacrificing his love for independence, and store up scenes and characters suited to his purpose’ (Pyne, 1832a, p.315). Presumably, it was sketches such as this that helped to fuel such accounts, and it may be that there are other examples that have remained undiscovered because of their uncharacteristic subject matter. A word of caution, though, because it might also have been the case that such an account of Girtin’s life encouraged someone to add an inscription to an unsigned kitchen interior, though, as I have noted, this example does look authentic.