- Description
-
- Creator(s)
- Thomas Girtin (1775-1802)
- Title
-
- An Exterior View of Henry VII’s Chapel, Westminster Abbey
- Date
- 1790 - 1791
- Medium and Support
- Watercolour and pen and ink on paper
- Dimensions
- 9.8 cm, 3 ⅞ in diam.
- Inscription
‘T Girtin’ lower left, by Girtin; ‘Henry VIIths Chapell’ lower centre
- Object Type
- Drawing for a Print
- Subject Terms
- Gothic Architecture: Cathedral View; London Architecture
-
- Collection
- Catalogue Number
- TG0026
- Description Source(s)
- Viewed in 2001
Provenance
Thomas Turner of Gloucester (unknown dates), after 1835; Puttick and Simpson, 20 June 1860; Ellesmere Library, John Egerton, 4th Earl of Ellesmere (1872–1944); bought by Henry Edwards Huntington (1850–1927), 1917
Bibliography
Wark, 1973, p.6
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About this Work
This signed drawing by Girtin was engraved and subsequently published by Charles Taylor (1756–1823) in his periodical The Temple of Taste on 1 April 1795. The text, bound alongside the engraving, notes that the print was taken ‘from an original drawing’, and since this particular formula is not used elsewhere there is a possibility that Girtin in this case did not base his watercolour on the work of another artist. The drawing was unknown to Thomas Girtin (1874–1960) and David Loshak (Girtin and Loshak, 1954) and was discovered after the publication of their catalogue in an extra-illustrated copy of John and Josiah Boydell’s The Dramatic Works of Shakespeare (1802). The edition originally ran to nine volumes, but this was expanded by its owner, Thomas Turner (unknown dates), to forty-five volumes by collecting and binding in more than 740 drawings and 3,000 prints as illustrations to the text of Shakespeare’s plays (Wark, 1993, pp.160–61). Turner began his collection of illustrations in 1835, but there are earlier examples of collectors adding drawings by Girtin into published texts, though they were without exception topographical publications, such as Thomas Pennant’s (1726–98) Some Account of London (TG1410 and TG1411). Typically, these drawings were small in scale, being sketches or early works that suited the budgets of collectors who purchased items, as here, for their sometimes quite tenuous links to a text. Girtin's view of the east end of Westminster Abbey was inserted into volume 26 of Shakespeare's works to illustrate Henry VI, Part 1 (Wark, 1973).
The architectural views included in The Temple of Taste were primarily classical buildings with the sole exception of three views of Westminster Abbey. Henry VII’s Chapel – or, more properly, the Lady Chapel – was built in the last years of the king’s life (1503–c.1510) to house the shrine of his father, Henry VI, whom the king hoped to see canonised. Taylor’s text describes the structure, which later became the burial place for the Tudor dynasty, in characteristically patriotic terms. He states that it is ‘reckoned the most curious and exquisite piece of Gothic architecture, as well externally as internally, in Europe’, adding that it was ‘erected when the study of Gothic had attained its highest excellence’. In all Girtin may have made as many as twenty-one drawings for Taylor’s publication, though this is one of only six that are known to survive.
(?) 1799
London: The Leathersellers’ Hall
TG1410
(?) 1799
London: The Interior of the Ruins of the Leathersellers’ Hall
TG1411