This view of Kingswear from Dartmouth, looking east over the river Dart, was almost certainly executed on Girtin’s West Country tour in the autumn of 1797. The artist is documented as having been in Exeter in early November, where he sketched the interior of the cathedral and along the river Exe, before journeying west along the south coast and then turning north to arrive at Bideford towards the end of the month. This is one of a series of views of the region’s coastal villages, ports and fashionable resorts that he sketched along the way (Chancery, Income and Expenses, 1804).¹ The size of the sketch and its careful detailing suggest that the artist had it in mind to make a finished watercolour of the subject and, indeed, there are two drawings that repeat the composition (TG1265 and TG1266). The latter was reproduced as an engraving by John Walker (active 1776–1802) for his Copper-Plate Magazine (see print after TG1265), and it may be that Girtin travelled to Dartmouth with a commission from the publisher for a view of Kingswear. The tour yielded two other views for Walker’s publication (TG1272 and TG1274), and it is possible, as with the 1796 trip to the north east and the Scottish Borders, that commissions for works to be engraved helped to finance this trip. The text accompanying Walker’s image notes only that Kingswear is ‘a pleasant village in Devonshire’, however, and it is equally possible that the location appealed more to the artist’s interest in the opportunities that coastal scenery provided for dispensing with tired compositional conventions (Walker, 1792–1802, vol.4, no.86, pl.171). As Susan Morris has noted, the view of Kingswear provides a good example of Girtin’s ‘radical … rejection of picturesque organization’, for ‘not only is the spectator suspended above the water, but the land bulges at the center and retreats into distance at the sides’, thus effecting a reversal of the landscape convention developed by the great seventeenth-century painter Claude Lorrain (1604/5–82), where the illusion of depth is concentrated centrally (Morris, 1986, p.17).

1797 - 1798

Kingswear, from Dartmouth

TG1265

1798 - 1799

Kingswear, from Dartmouth

TG1266

1797 - 1798

Kingswear, from Dartmouth

TG1265

1796 - 1797

Totnes, from the River Dart

TG1272

1797 - 1798

The Marine Barracks at Stonehouse, Plymouth

TG1274