- Description
-
- Creator(s)
- Thomas Girtin (1775-1802)
- Title
-
- The Eruption of Mount Vesuvius
- Date
- 1799 - 1800
- Medium and Support
- Graphite and watercolour on laid paper
- Dimensions
- 32 × 46.5 cm, 12 ⅝ × 18 ¼ in
- Inscription
‘Girtin / Drawn in the House of R.K.P. / 1800’ on the back, by Richard Ker Porter; 'T.C.G.' on the back, lower right, by Thomas Calvert Girtin
- Object Type
- Sketching Society Drawing
- Subject Terms
- Hills and Mountains
-
- Collection
- Catalogue Number
- TG1504
- Description Source(s)
- Viewed in 2001
Provenance
Thomas Calvert Girtin (1801–74); then by descent to George Wyndham Hog Girtin (1835–1911); then by a settlement to his sister, Julia Hog Cooper (née Girtin) (1839–1904); her sale, Davis, Castleton, Sherborne, 2 December 1884, lot 43 as 'Volcanic Mountain'; ... B. de le Bullock; his sale, Sotheby’s, 20 July 1978, lot 171 as 'A Volcano Erupting', £500; Christopher Norris; his sale, Sotheby’s, 19 November 1987, lot 71, £18,700; Thos. Agnew & Sons; Eugene Victor Thaw (1927–2018); presented to the Library, 1996
Exhibition History
New Haven, 1986a, not in the catalogue; New York, 1992, no.48; New York, 1994, no.57; New York, 1996, no.51; New York, 1998, no.75; New York, 2017, no.160
Bibliography
Morris, 1986, p.20; Brooke, 2002, pp.216–17
Other entries in London and the Home Counties, Together with Miscellaneous Studies and Views

Windsor Castle, from the River Thames
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Great Bookham Church, from the East
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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 North West
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

St Albans Abbey, from the North West
Private Collection

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

The Interior of St Albans Abbey
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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
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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, New York

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

Westminster Abbey, Seen from Green Park and the Queen's Basin
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

Turver’s Farm, Radwinter
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

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, The 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

Effingham Churchyard, Formerly Known as 'A Country Churchyard'
Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge

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
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The Eruption of Mount Vesuvius
The Morgan Library & Museum, New York

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

A Study of a Woman Reading; A Slight Study of a Seated Woman
Private Collection

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

The Head of a Youth, Here Identified as Joseph Mallord William Turner
Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

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Footnotes
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About this Work
This imaginary view by Girtin of a volcano erupting appears to have been painted at a meeting of the Sketching Society. According to an inscription in the Society’s Minute Book, the subject set by Robert Ker Porter (1777–1842) on the evening of 2 November 1799 was ‘Mount Vesuv’, though the poetic passage and the identity of its author were not specified (Sketching Society, Minute Book).1
There are two possible poetic sources amongst the works of the most popular authors with the Society’s members, James Thomson (1700–48) and the Revd Thomas Gisborne (1758–1846). Thomson’s Liberty; A Poem contains the lines:
whilst the description of autumn in Gisborne’s Walks in a Forest includes a long evocation of the eruption of Mount Etna as detailed by Sir William Hamilton (1730–1803):
The drawings by the other five members who attended the meeting, the amateurs Thomas Richard Underwood (1772–1836), John Charles Denham (1777–1867) and Thomas George Worthington (unknown dates), and young professionals of Girtin’s generation, François Louis Thomas Francia (1772–1839), Paul Sandby Munn (1773–1845) and George Samuel (active 1785–1823), do not appear to have survived, and it is not therefore clear which poet provided the inspiration for Girtin’s work, though the fact that Thomson specifies Vesuvius as his subject tilts the balance in that direction.
The lack of comparative material compounds other uncertainties about the status of Girtin’s monochrome study. These centre on the fact that the back of the drawing has been inscribed ‘Girtin Drawn in the House of R. K. P. 1800’, presumably by Porter, who, as the host for the evening, would have kept all of the drawings that were produced. It is of course possible that he simply misremembered the date, and the inscription may have been added much later (three groups of Sketching Society subjects were included in his posthumous sale (Exhibitions: Christie’s, 30 March 1843, lots 120–22)), but the inscription reawakens a nagging concern that the drawing is too big and just too carefully worked to have been the product of just the three hours that were allowed to members to complete their work. The watercolour may only be in monochrome, but its effect is built up from multiple layers of wash, each of which would have had to dry before work recommenced. Additionally, other areas left untouched to create highlights would have taken too much time and required to much planning and foresight to have been produced in one session. Thus, as with a number of ‘sketches’ that appear to have been worked in the field, but that contain so much labour that they must have been studio works, I suspect either that this drawing is a later reworking of a sketch begun at Porter’s home in 1799 or that Girtin began afresh and made a new composition based on his original sketch. If the latter was the case, then it was presumably at this point that the artist developed details such as the lighthouse and the twin domes of the church on the coast, which suggest that he might even have checked his earlier works for evidence of the topography of the Neapolitan coastline (such as TG0653).
1794 - 1797
Naples: Looking across the Bay towards Vesuvius, from Mergellina
TG0653