This view, taken from an enclosed road on the hill above Posillipo looking north east to Naples, was copied from a composition by John Robert Cozens (1752–97) (see figure 1). It was produced at the home of Dr Thomas Monro (1759–1833), where Girtin and his contemporary Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) were employed across three winters, probably between 1794 and 1797, to make ‘finished drawings’ from the ‘Copies’ of the ‘outlines or unfinished drawings of Cozens’. The majority of the resulting watercolours saw the two artists engaged in a unique collaboration; as they later recalled, Girtin ‘drew in outlines and Turner washed in the effects’. ‘They went at 6 and staid till Ten’ and, as the diarist Joseph Farington (1747–1821) reported, Turner received ‘3s. 6d each night’, though ‘Girtin did not say what He had’ (Farington, Diary, 12 November 1798).¹

Cozens’ on-the-spot sketch is inscribed with the date, 18 October 1782, and the location, ‘In the Road on the Top of Pausilippo’, and also notes the ‘Castle of St Elmo’. This last note presumably refers to the direction of the view, as the castle is several kilometres away and the walls to the right here are on nothing like the scale of Sant’Elmo. The sketch is found at the beginning of the fourth of the seven sketchbooks from Cozens’ second Italian trip, which saw the artist travel to Naples in the company of his patron William Beckford (1760–1844). During his four-month stay in and around Naples, the artist sketched many of the standard picturesque views but also noted a series of unconventional scenes in which the city’s walls crowd in and occlude the famous sights. It is not known whether Girtin and Turner had any say in the selection of the subjects to be depicted or whether they were chosen by Monro. However, the frequent appearance of unconventional viewpoints such as this, and the views of the Fanciscan convent at Salerno (TG0721) and Castel Sant’Elmo itself (TG0736), suggests the former, and that they were conscious that copying a range of Cozens’ compositions could be beneficial for their subsequent careers.

The Monro School watercolour was in all probability not copied directly from this sketch by Cozens, however. An album put together by Sir George Beaumont (1753–1827), now in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, contains ‘215 “tracings” or drawings on oiled paper’, and this was lent to Monro for his copyists to work from (Sloan and Joyner, 1993, pp.89–91). The album contains more than seventy tracings from on-the-spot drawings in the first three of the sketchbooks, and these provided the basis for more than thirty Monro School works. There are only five tracings from the next three books, but there is no reason to think that many others did not exist, and it was presumably from these lost copies by Cozens himself that as many as thirty-five more watercolours were produced by Girtin and Turner, including this unconventional view. The notion that the Monro School artists worked from simple outline tracings, rather than the on-the-spot sketches, is supported by two considerations. Firstly, it is highly unlikely that Beckford would have lent out the sketchbooks and, given that Cozens took the trouble to make copies of so many of the drawings, it is clear that the patron, and not the artist, retained the books. Secondly, and perhaps more significantly, Monro School copies such as this example never follow the shading or the distribution of light seen in the on-the-spot sketches, though they always replicate the basic outlines found in the tracings.

This is one of several hundred works bought by Turner at Monro’s posthumous sale in 1833, the bulk of which were attributed to him alone. The cataloguer of the Turner Bequest, Alexander Finberg, in contrast thought that Girtin was responsible for watercolours such as this example, whilst more recently Andrew Wilton has established their joint authorship (Finberg, 1909, vol.2, p.1237; Wilton, 1984a, pp.8–23). Identifying the division of labour within Monro School drawings is considerably helped, as here, when Turner’s colour washes leave some of the pencil work untouched in order to create highlights and for the figures. In practice, Girtin did little more than trace the general outlines of the composition and it was left to Turner to obscure the essentially mechanical task of replication.

1794 - 1797

Salerno: An Ancient Cypress in the Garden of the Franciscan Convent

TG0721

1794 - 1797

Naples: Castel Sant’Elmo

TG0736