This monochrome drawing is known only from a photograph in the Girtin Archive that is annotated by Thomas Girtin (1874–1960) as ‘By Girtin throughout’ (Girtin Archive, 12/10). The artist made several hundred pencil copies at the home of his patron Dr Thomas Monro (1759–1833) from myriad sources. Though his contemporary Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) ‘washed in the effects’ in the majority of cases to create the distinctive Monro School drawings, there are inevitably a number of examples where his outlines were not touched on, or where he just lightly washed them himself (Farington, Diary, 12 November 1798).¹ Works such as this were presumably amongst the items sold under Girtin’s name at Monro’s posthumous sale in 1833 as ‘Unfinished sketches’ or ‘Foreign views’ (Christie’s, 1 July 1833, lots 101 and 103), though it is also possible that they were produced by the artist as records of compositions for his own reference. This indeed might have been the case here, since it seems that Monro owned another, more finished version of the same composition (TG0747). The idea that the work was not produced for the patron is supported by the fact that it employs a coarse laid paper, rather than the fine wove that was invariably used for the Monro School watercolours. This was the support used in two similar works that appeared at the Squire Gallery in London in 1954 and 1955 as by Girtin, Part of Padua, Seen from the Walls (TG0705) and An Unidentified Mausoleum, Probably near Rome (TG0543), and together they formed a distinctive group.

As with the finished watercolour, this work is based on a composition that is known from an on-the-spot sketch by John Robert Cozens (1752–97), which is inscribed ‘Banks of ye Arno near Florence Sept.21 – from the Cascines’ (see figure 1), meaning that it was made on the return from the artist’s second trip to the Continent, in the autumn of 1783 (Bell and Girtin, 1935, no.386). The sketch is found in the sixth of the seven sketchbooks that are associated with a visit that began with a journey to Naples in the company of his patron William Beckford (1760–1844). It is unlikely that this version of the view of the convent of Monte Oliveti was copied directly from the sketch by Cozens, however. It would have been uncharacteristic of Beckford to have lent the sketchbooks to Monro, and the existence of a large number of tracings of their contents by Cozens himself suggests that the patron, rather than the artist, retained the books. An album put together by Sir George Beaumont (1753–1827), now in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, includes more than seventy tracings from on-the-spot drawings in the first three of the sketchbooks, and these provided the basis for at least thirty Monro School works. There are only five tracings from the next three books, but there is no reason to think that others did not exist, and it was presumably from these lost copies by Cozens that as many as thirty-five more watercolours were produced, including at least two other views of Florence (TG0747 and TG0752a) and two of the river Arno in its vicinity (TG0749 and TG0751). The fact that this work, as with all of the Monro School copies, does not follow either the shading or the distribution of light seen in the on-the-spot sketches, though it does replicate the basic outlines, further suggests that Girtin worked from a tracing of the sketchbook view.

1794 - 1797

Florence: The Convent of Monte Oliveto, from the Banks of the Arno

TG0747

1794 - 1797

Part of Padua, Seen from the Walls

TG0705

1794 - 1797

An Unidentified Mausoleum, Probably near Rome

TG0543

1794 - 1797

Florence: The Convent of Monte Oliveto, from the Banks of the Arno

TG0747

1794 - 1797

Florence: The View from the Boboli Gardens across the Valley of the Arno

TG0752a

1794 - 1797

A Villa on the Banks of the River Arno, Known as ‘The Villa Salviati’

TG0749

1794 - 1797

A View on the River Arno, with a Tower on a Hill

TG0751