This simple drawing of the northern Italian city of Padua, seen from the walls with the dome of the cathedral in the centre, has always been attributed to Girtin alone, rather than being seen as a collaboration with his colleague Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851). The view is nonetheless, like most of their collaborations, still based on an outline by John Robert Cozens (1752–97), inscribed ‘Part of Padua from the walls – the mountains of the Tirol – June 18’, that is mounted in an album now at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven (see the source image above). This was almost certainly traced by Cozens himself from an on-the-spot sketch he made on a second visit to Italy in 1782 (Bell and Girtin, 1935, no.214), when the artist accompanied his patron William Beckford (1760–1844) through northern Italy to Naples. The sketch is one of three Padua subjects (the others being TG0704 and TG0705a) in the first of seven sketchbooks that survive from the trip (The Whitworth, Manchester (D.1974.4.20)), and it was presumably traced by Cozens because the books were retained by Beckford. Monro’s posthumous sale, in 1833, contained only twenty or so sketches by Cozens, so the patron must have borrowed the majority of the ‘outlines or unfinished drawings’ copied by Girtin and, in other cases, coloured by Turner. In this case, the source of the drawing was presumably purchased at the sale of ‘Mr COZENS’ in July 1794 by Sir George Beaumont (1753–1827).¹ As Kim Sloan has noted, Beaumont mounted ‘215 “tracings” or drawings on oiled paper’ in an album that he presumably lent to Monro, and it was from this collection that the two young artists produced more than fifty watercolours (Sloan and Joyner, 1993, pp.89–91). This drawing is a simple unadorned copy of the Cozens outline in which Girtin chose to ignore the storm effect, with lightning cutting across the sky, that appears in both the tracing and the on-the-spot sketch. Beckford himself described the dramatic thunderstorm that coincided with his visit to Padua (Beckford, 1834, p.159) and Cozens duly made a feature out of it in the spectacular watercolour that he subsequently worked up for his patron (see figure 1).

The view of Padua was sold in 1955 with another Monro School drawing that also appears to have been executed by Girtin working on his own, An Unidentified Mausoleum, Probably near Rome (TG0543). Girtin made several hundred pencil copies at Monro’s home from myriad sources, and, though ‘Turner washed in the effects’ in the majority of cases to create the distinctive Monro School drawings, there are inevitably a number of examples where the outlines were not touched on or just lightly washed, as here (Farington, Diary, 12 November 1798). 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’ (Exhibitions: Christie’s, 1 July 1833, lots 101 and 103).

1794 - 1797

The Euganean Hills, Seen from the Walls of Padua

TG0704

1800 - 1820

The Abbey of Santa Giustina at Padua

TG0705a

1794 - 1797

An Unidentified Mausoleum, Probably near Rome

TG0543