- 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
- 28.9 × 44.2 cm, 11 ⅜ × 17 ⅜ in
- Object Type
- Studio Watercolour
- Subject Terms
- Castle Ruins; North Wales
Provenance
Private collection, Wales; the sale of a Gentleman, Sotheby’s, 9 May 1956, lot 41; bought by Thos. Agnew & Sons, £620; bought by the museum, 1956
Exhibition History
Ipswich, 1978, no.1; London, World of Watercolours, 1986, no.5; Norwich, 1993, no.24
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
Private Collection, Bedfordshire
Rhuddlan Castle, from the River Clwyd
Tate, London
The Great Hall, Conwy Castle
Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield
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
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, Birkenhead
The Cain Falls (Pistyll Cain), near Dolgellau
British Museum, London
The Cain Falls (Pistyll Cain), near Dolgellau
Birmingham Museum & 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
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
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
Private Collection, Bedfordshire
Cadair Idris, from the Estuary near Barmouth
Private Collection
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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 TG1312). 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 Samuel Hieronymus Grimm (1733–94), 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.
None of the four versions of the composition are dated, and there appears to be no particular evidence to suggest either the order in which they were produced or that one is the first or primary model. Aside from their size, the works are extremely close, marked only by small differences in the shipping and figures and minor variations in the skies, and it is primarily their condition that distinguishes them. This work shows some signs of fading, with three thin strips along its sides indicating how a later mount protected these areas from the detrimental effect of light. However, the changes, though evident, do not alter the overall colour balance in the way that occurs in both TG1309 and TG1310, where the artist used a different palette, including fugitive blue and yellow pigments, which means that the greens have been corrupted and all the blues, except for in one area of the sky, have been lost. The fact that this work employs a more stable palette, closer to the careful selection of steadfast pigments that Girtin’s master, Edward Dayes (1763–1804), passed on to the artist, should, in theory, suggest an earlier date. However, such is the dearth of dated watercolours from prior to 1800 – just four from 1798 and 1799 – that close-dating of the type that I attempted in the catalogue of the 2002 Girtin bicentenary exhibition now seems neither possible nor appropriate (Smith, 2002b).
1798 - 1799
The Eagle Tower, Caernarfon Castle
TG1309
1798 - 1799
The Eagle Tower, Caernarfon Castle
TG1310
1798 - 1799
The Eagle Tower, Caernarfon Castle
TG1312
1791 - 1792
Tintern Abbey, from the River Wye
TG0058
1798 - 1799
The Eagle Tower, Caernarfon Castle
TG1309
1798 - 1799
The Eagle Tower, Caernarfon Castle
TG1310