- Description
-
- Creator(s)
- Thomas Girtin (1775-1802)
- Title
-
- The Eagle Tower, Caernarfon Castle
- Date
- 1798 - 1799
- Medium and Support
- Graphite and watercolour on laid paper
- Dimensions
- 39.1 × 49.3 cm, 15 ⅜ × 19 ⅜ in
- Inscription
'Girtin' lower left, by Thomas Girtin
- Object Type
- Studio Watercolour
- Subject Terms
- Castle Ruins; North Wales
Provenance
Hugh Chambres Jones (1783–1869); then by descent
Place depicted
Other entries in The 1798 Welsh Tour:
Sketches and Subsequent Watercolours
Rhuddlan Castle, from the River Clwyd
Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University
Rhuddlan Castle, from the River Clwyd
Southill Park, Bedfordshire
Rhuddlan Castle, from the River Clwyd
Tate, London
The Eagle Tower, Caernarfon Castle
National Museum of Wales, Cardiff
The Eagle Tower, Caernarfon Castle
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
The Eagle Tower, Caernarfon Castle
Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery
The Eagle Tower, Caernarfon Castle
Private Collection, North Wales
Caernarfon: A Street Scene with Plas Mawr
Tate, London
Caernarfon Castle, from the River Seiont
British Museum, London
Caernarfon Castle, from the River Seiont
Williamson Art Gallery & Museum, Birkenhead
The Cain Falls (Pistyll Cain), near Dolgellau
British Museum, London
The Cain Falls (Pistyll Cain), near Dolgellau
Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery
A Mountain View, near Beddgelert
British Museum, London
A Bridge over the Glaslyn, near Beddgelert
British Museum, London
Pont Seiont, Looking Towards Mynydd Mawr (Big Mountain)
British Museum, London
Pont Seiont, Looking Towards Mynydd Mawr (Big Mountain)
Private Collection
Pont y Pair, Betws-y-Coed
Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Museum, Loan from George and Patti White
Llyn Tegid (Bala Lake), Looking towards Cadair Idris
Private Collection
A View of Hills and a River, Probably in North Wales
British Museum, London
Denbigh Castle and the Vale of Clwyd
British Museum, London
An Unidentified Landscape, Possibly the Vale of Clwyd
Valle Crucis Abbey, from the River; Studies of Seated Figures
Private Collection
Valle Crucis Abbey, from the River
Private Collection
Valle Crucis Abbey, from the River
Private Collection
Valle Crucis Abbey, from the River
National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth
Valle Crucis Abbey, from the River
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven
Valle Crucis Abbey: From the Cloister Looking Towards the Dormitory
Private Collection
Valle Crucis Abbey: The Chapter House, from the South West
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven
A River Scene, Probably the Dee near Corwen
The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens, San Marino
The Cloisters of Chester Cathedral
Private Collection
The Red Castle, from Hawk Lake, with a Distant View of Shrewsbury
Private Collection
Wroxeter: The Roman Wall
Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Museum, Loan from George and Patti White
The Old Severn Bridge at Bridgnorth
British Museum, London
Hereford Cathedral, from across the River Wye
Private Collection
The Great Hall, Kenilworth Castle
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
The Great Hall, Kenilworth Castle
Private Collection
The Great Hall, Kenilworth Castle
Private Collection
An Unidentified Valley, Probably in North Wales
Southill Park, Bedfordshire
Cadair Idris, from the Estuary near Barmouth
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 is one of four versions of a composition that shows Caernarfon Castle and the Eagle Tower from the north west, looking across the river Seoint (the others being TG1309, TG1310 and TG1311). The watercolours, depicting Edward I’s (1239–1307) great thirteenth-century fortress, were presumably based on a drawing made by Girtin on his 1798 tour of North Wales, though the original sketch does not appear to have survived. The view was very popular with artists, amateur and professional alike. In choosing to portray the castle from this angle, with part of the town walls to the left, the mountains in the distance and a busy shipping scene in the foreground, Girtin followed in the footsteps of Paul Sandby (c.1730–1809) and his master Edward Dayes (1763–1804) whose view of the Eagle Tower was taken from almost exactly the same spot (work untraced), whilst the artist’s contemporary Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) made a very similar sketch just a few weeks after Girtin’s visit, probably sometime in August 1798 (see TG1310 figure 1). According to one of the many tourists who visited Caernarfon at this time, Sir Richard Colt Hoare (1758–1838), this particular view provided ‘a glorious study for the artist’s portfolio’, since it was ‘truly picturesque’ on account of the ‘lively bustling scene’ of the port. The Eagle Tower, the scene of the birth of the first English Prince of Wales, may have been the ‘chief object of attraction’ for Hoare, but his preoccupation was primarily with the visual qualities of the site, unlike so many of his contemporaries, for whom the scene often sparked lengthy moral digressions (quoted in Thompson, 1983, p.263). These commonly took the form of criticism of Edward I’s despotic behaviour, and the castle itself was identified as a monument to ‘tyranny … calculated to keep the surrounding districts in awe and subjection’ (Hucks, 1795, p.91), whilst the king’s campaign in North Wales was said to be conducted at the expense of ‘Cambrian Independence and Cambrian Liberty’ (Evans, 1804, p.174). The Revd Richard Warner (1763–1857) echoed this sentiment, but, as he noted, the fine preservation of the castle ‘does not produce those lively emotions in the mind’ (Warner, 1799, p.139). The point is significant because Girtin would probably have known Warner’s text since his view of Tintern Abbey was used as the book’s frontispiece (see print after TG0058), and he may have shared its political sentiments, but, nonetheless, he did not feel able to develop a historical, associative reading of the scene any more than Sandby had done a generation earlier.
Girtin and Loshak were unaware of this version of Girtin’s popular composition when compiling their catalogue and only now has it been illustrated for the first time. Although the work has suffered some fading, it remains a good example of the artist’s ability to maintain a consistent level of quality across multiple versions of his most popular compositions. This was a skill that Girtin was particularly called upon to display in his Welsh scenes which consistently sold well, perhaps because the artist tended, as here, to adopt a viewpoint sanctioned by tradition. There are small variations across the four watercolours in terms of the disposition of the figures and the beached shipping, as well as in their size, but the mood of each is consistently bright and the skies essentially benign. The one significant difference, the squarer format with the landscape setting cut to the right, might suggest a slightly later date for this, the second largest of the group, but the stylistic consistency within the group means that it is fruitless to speculate on which might be the earliest and which the latest work especially as none are dated.
1798 - 1799
The Eagle Tower, Caernarfon Castle
TG1309
1798 - 1799
The Eagle Tower, Caernarfon Castle
TG1310
1798 - 1799
The Eagle Tower, Caernarfon Castle
TG1311
1791 - 1792
Tintern Abbey, from the River Wye
TG0058