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Works Thomas Girtin and Joseph Mallord William Turner after John Henderson

Dover Harbour: Fishing Vessels, Their Sails Drying

1795 - 1796

Primary Image: TG0798: Thomas Girtin (1775–1802) and Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851), after John Henderson (1764–1843), Dover Harbour: Fishing Vessels, Their Sails Drying, 1795–96, graphite and watercolour on wove paper (watermark: 1794 / J WHATMAN), 45 × 59.4 cm, 17 ¾ × 23 ⅜ in. Tate, Turner Bequest CCCLXXVIII, 5 (D36620).

Photo courtesy of Tate (All Rights Reserved)

Artist's source: John Henderson (1764–1843), Shipping Aground, graphite on paper, 42.7 × 56.5 cm, 16 13/17 × 22 ¼ in. British Museum, London (1935,0219.2).

Photo courtesy of The Trustees of the British Museum (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Description
Creator(s)
Thomas Girtin (1775-1802) and Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) after John Henderson (1764-1843)
Title
  • Dover Harbour: Fishing Vessels, Their Sails Drying
Date
1795 - 1796
Medium and Support
Graphite and watercolour on wove paper (watermark: 1794 / J WHATMAN)
Dimensions
45 × 59.4 cm, 17 ¾ × 23 ⅜ in
Object Type
Collaborations; Monro School Copy; Work after an Amateur Artist
Subject Terms
Coasts and Shipping; Dover and Kent

Collection
Catalogue Number
TG0798
Description Source(s)
Viewed in January 2018

Provenance

Dr Thomas Monro (1759–1833); his posthumous sale, Christie's, 26 June 1833, lot 111 as 'Shipping in Dover Harbour in Indian ink (9)' by 'Turner'; bought by Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851), £5 5s; accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest, 1856

Exhibition History

National Gallery, London, on display up to 1920

Bibliography

Finberg, 1909, vol.2, p.1241 as 'Shipping aground' by Thomas Girtin; MacColl, 1920, p.136; Turner Online as 'Dover Harbour: Fishing Vessels Drying their Sails' by Joseph Mallord William Turner and Thomas Girtin (Accessed 12/09/2022)

About this Work

This view of fishing vessels in the harbour at Dover with their sails drying was bought by Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) at the posthumous sale of Dr Thomas Monro (1759–1833), one of as many as a hundred views of the town and its environs listed in the catalogue (Exhibitions: Christie’s, 26 June 1833; Christie’s, 1 July 1833). The watercolour was produced at Monro’s home, where Turner and Girtin were employed across three winters, probably between 1794 and 1797, to copy ‘the outlines or unfinished drawings of’ principally John Robert Cozens (1752–97), but other artists too, including the patron’s neighbour, the amateur John Henderson (1764–1843), who lent his ‘outlines for this purpose’ (Farington, Diary, 30 December 1794). Henderson visited Dover in the autumn of 1794 and the ‘outlines of Shipping & Boats’ he made there, described by the diarist Joseph Farington (1747–1821) as ‘Very ingenious & careful’, provided the basis for a substantial number of copies commissioned from Girtin and Turner by Monro (Farington, Diary, 1 December 1795). As with the copies the artists made after the sketches of Cozens, ‘Girtin drew in outlines and Turner washed in the effects’, with Turner receiving ‘3s. 6d each night’ though ‘Girtin did not say what He had’ (Farington, Diary, 12 November 1798).1

Girtin is not known to have visited Dover and all of his views of the town were copied after other artists, including his master, Edward Dayes (1763–1804). However, whilst Turner travelled to the port in 1793 and executed a series of studio watercolours after his own sketches, the majority of the Dover subjects sold from Monro’s collection were still produced after secondary sources. In this case, the watercolour was copied from a large outline by Henderson that was bequeathed by his son to the British Museum (see the source image above) along with other views of Dover. Indeed, overlaying images of the watercolour and its source suggests that Girtin actually traced Henderson’s outline, so close is the congruence of forms. The method employed by Girtin is not documented, but it probably involved the use of a strong light source to render the outline translucent so that it could then be traced onto another piece of paper laid on a piece of glass. It was then Turner’s rather more onerous task to add washes of blue and grey to produce a commodity somewhere between an on-the-spot sketch and a finished watercolour, or as close as could be achieved in the few night-time hours available to him at Monro’s house. It is to Girtin’s credit that he was able to transcend a simple mechanical task and render his lines with at least some of the invention and individual character displayed in his on-the-spot sketches, though he does appear to have employed a ruler for the straight lines of the rigging.

Henderson’s numerous Dover views are essentially variations on a set of themes, with the same vessels, buildings, views and naval operations returning in different guises across the sketches. The drawings are further united by the same meticulous attention to detail, which suggests that the amateur employed a mechanical aid such as a camera obscura to fix the forms, meaning that it was the task of the young professional artists to bring a precise record of coastal labours to life. In this case, it is the rigging of the boats that is the focus of particular attention, down to the detail of the fisherman’s clothing drying on rope to the left. Henderson may have had his limitations as an artist. However, in combining a careful record of the range of tasks undertaken by as many as twenty figures with a composition that avoids worn-out picturesque conventions in favour of a more random alignment of vessels, with views of the ships cut left and right, he provided both Girtin and Turner with a significant challenge to overcome.

Image Overlay

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).

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