- Description
-
- Creator(s)
- Thomas Girtin (1775-1802)
- Title
-
- London: The Interior of the Ruins of the Leathersellers’ Hall
- Date
- (?) 1799
- Medium and Support
- Graphite, watercolour and pen and ink on wove paper, on a later mount
- Dimensions
- 44.7 × 61.2 cm, 17 ⅝ × 24 ⅛ in
- Inscription
'Leather Sellers Hall over the Crypt of St. Helens Monastery - ' on the mount, by John Charles Crowle; 'T. Girtin delt.' on the mount, lower right, by John Charles Crowle
- Object Type
- Studio Watercolour
- Subject Terms
- London Architecture; Monastic Ruins
-
- Collection
-
- British Museum, London
- (G,12.183)
- Catalogue Number
- TG1411
- Girtin & Loshak Number
- 282 as 'Leathersellers Hall'; '1798–9'
- Description Source(s)
- Viewed in 2001, 2002 and 2018
Provenance
Thomas Girtin (1775–1802); his posthumous sale, Christie’s, 1 June 1803, lot 122 as 'Leathersellers’ Hall, Bishopsgate Street, before it was pulled down', £5 10s; John Charles Crowle (1738–1811); bequeathed as part of the fourteen volume set of Thomas Pennant's Some Account of London (3rd edn.), 1811
Exhibition History
London, 2002, no.69
Bibliography
Binyon, 1898–1907, no.107 as 'Leather Sellers' Hall, Over the Crypt of St. Helen's Monastery'; Davies, 1924, pl.24
Place depicted
Other entries in London and the Home Counties, Together with Miscellaneous Studies and Views

Windsor Castle, from the River Thames
Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Museum

Great Bookham Church, from the East
Private Collection, Norfolk

Windsor Park and Castle, from Snow Hill
Anglesey Abbey, Cambridgeshire (National Trust)

The Gateway, St Albans Abbey
Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

St Albans Abbey: The West Porch
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

St Albans Abbey: The West Porch
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

St Albans Abbey, from the East
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

An Interior View of St Albans Abbey, from the Crossing
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide

The Interior of St Albans Abbey
Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery

Windsor Castle and the Great Park, from the South West
Private Collection, Norfolk

Windsor Great Park: Herne’s Oak with a Herd of Deer
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

Stags Fighting amongst a Herd of Deer in Windsor Great Park, with the Castle in the Distance
Private Collection

A Herd of Deer in Richmond Park
Private Collection

A Panoramic View of the Thames from the Adelphi Terrace, Section One: Somerset House to Blackfriars Bridge
Private Collection

A Panoramic View of the Thames from the Adelphi Terrace, Section Two: The Surrey Bank
Private Collection

A Panoramic View of the Thames from the Adelphi Terrace, Section Three: Westminster Bridge to York Stairs
Private Collection

Westminster, from the West Corner of the Adelphi Terrace
Private Collection

The Thames with St Paul's and Blackfriars Bridge
The Morgan Library & Museum

Shipping on the Thames, Looking down Limehouse Reach towards Greenwich, with the Church of St Alfege in the Distance
Private Collection

A Haystack on a Farm, on the Road to Harrow-on-the-Hill
Private Collection

A Panoramic Landscape, near Norwood
Private Collection

St James’s Park, with Westminster Abbey in the Distance
National Gallery of Art, Washington

St Paul’s Cathedral, from St Martin’s-le-Grand
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

St Paul's Cathedral, from St Martin’s-le-Grand
Untraced Works

St Paul’s Cathedral, from St Martin’s-le-Grand
Private Collection

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
Private Collection

London: The Leathersellers’ Hall
British Museum, London

London: The Interior of the Ruins of the Leathersellers’ Hall
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

Tintern Village, Seen across the Forge Pond, Formerly 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
Tate, London

The Eruption of Mount Vesuvius
The Morgan Library & Museum

The Archangel Gabriel Awaiting Night, from John Milton's Paradise Lost
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

Portrait Study of a Man, Said to Be the Artist George Barret the Younger
Private Collection

A Study of a Lion from the Tower of London
Private Collection

An Open Field with a Cart and Horses, Known as ‘The Carter’
British Museum, London

A Church Seen across Fields, with Another Sketch Depicting a Woman
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
Private Collection

Old London Bridge, with the Shot Tower in Construction, and St Olave's Church
Private Collection
Revisions & Feedback
The website will be updated from time to time and, when changes are made, a PDF of the previous version of each page will be archived here for consultation and citation.
Please help us to improve this catalogue
If you have information, a correction or any other suggestions to improve this catalogue, please contact us.
About this Work
This unusual view of the partially demolished interior of the sixteenth-century Leathersellers’ Hall was acquired by John Charles Crowle (1738–1811) after Girtin’s death, together with a sketch of the exterior of the building (TG1410). The guild of Leathersellers had decided to demolish their dining hall in order to rebuild it nearby, and, prior to its final demolition in 1799, the auctioneer, a ‘Mr Edwards’, stripped the building of its fittings and announced their sale in the press on 14 March, adding that the ‘Curious may have an Opportunity of viewing it before it is pulled down’; this is essentially what we see in Girtin’s view. Well-dressed men and women take one final look, and an artist makes a sketch of a detail of the architecture before the building is swept away. The loss of the hall, with its fine plaster work and panelling, was not the point that most concerned critics of the move, however, for the process had also revealed the existence of a fine thirteenth-century vaulted undercroft, part of the ancient Benedictine nunnery attached to the church of St Helen Bishopsgate (see figure 1). The Leathersellers had bought the site of the nunnery in the sixteenth century and built their hall into the fabric of the dormitory, and for antiquarians such as the author James Peller Malcolm (1767–1815) their decision to demolish another one of the capital’s ancient monuments was cause for much anger. Malcolm bemoaned at length the fate of a ‘beautiful work’, and he recalled the ‘regret with which I saw those slender pillars torn from their bases, and the strong, though delicate, arches sundered in masses’ (Malcolm, 1802–7, vol.3, p.563). It is precisely this detail that the artist, seated in the deep gloom of the undercroft, seeks to record with time running out and the eighteenth-century equivalent of the wrecking ball, a dramatically placed ladder, poised and ready.
The drawing was bought by Crowle at Girtin’s posthumous sale for £5 10s, where it was titled ‘Leathersellers’ Hall, Bishopsgate Street, before it was pulled down’ (Exhibitions: Christie’s, 1 June 1803, lot 122). Girtin had presumably failed to find a purchaser for his watercolour, though it seems he had more success with another, untraced version, which was exhibited after his death as ‘Ancient Crypt of St Helen’s, Bishopsgate’ (Exhibitions: London, 1823, no.17*). Crowle’s other view of the hall by Girtin, showing the exterior, is an on-the-spot sketch, but the collector was also willing to pay good money for a studio work, and this is of particular interest because it was not acquired to be framed for display on the wall but was used instead as an illustration for a multi-volume copy of Thomas Pennant’s (1726–98) Some Account of London (Pennant, 1793). In all, Crowle assembled over three thousand images of the city’s topography, as well as of the people and historical events associated with it, binding them into fourteen folio volumes, which were bequeathed to the British Museum in 1811 (Adams, 1982, pp.123–39). This watercolour is interleaved into volume twelve of the rebound text from the 1793 edition – that is, from a date before the building’s destruction – though it does not actually relate to Pennant’s text on the nunnery of St Helen’s, which is found in volume seven, where the exterior view is located. The practice of grangerising, as the addition of extra-illustrations to texts was known, was a popular pastime at this date, but few had the means to buy the finished works of celebrated artists and then use them in such an arbitrary, indeed cavalier, way.
(?) 1799
London: The Leathersellers’ Hall
TG1410