- Description
-
- Creator(s)
- Thomas Girtin (1775-1802)
- Title
-
- The Gateway, St Albans Abbey
- Date
- (?) 1796
- Medium and Support
- Graphite on wove paper
- Dimensions
- 15 × 23.1 cm, 5 ⅞ × 9 in
- Inscription
‘Girtin’ lower left, by Thomas Girtin; ‘Gateway Saint Albans’ lower centre, by Thomas Girtin
- Object Type
- Outline Drawing
-
- Collection
- Catalogue Number
- TG1034
- Girtin & Loshak Number
- 415 as 'St. Alban's, The Abbey Gate-House'; '1800–1'
- Description Source(s)
- Viewed in 2001 and 2016
Provenance
Thomas Calvert Girtin (1801–74); then by descent to George Wyndham Hog Girtin (1835–1911); then by a settlement to his sister, Mary Hog Barnard (née Girtin) (1828–99); then by descent to Francis Pierrepont Barnard (1854–1931); his widow, Isabella Barnard; bequeathed to the Museum, 1934
Bibliography
Brown, 1982, p.340, no.741
Place depicted
Other entries in London and the Home Counties, Together with Miscellaneous Studies and Views

Windsor Castle, from the River Thames
Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Museum

Great Bookham Church, from the East
Private Collection, Norfolk

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
Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery

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
Private Collection

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
Tate, London

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

Old London Bridge, with the Shot Tower in Construction, and St Olave's Church
Private Collection
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About this Work
Girtin visited St Albans around 1796, when, as preparation for a major watercolour depicting the interior of the abbey church that was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1797 (TG1040), he made a number of pencil sketches, including a similar view of the west porch of the abbey (TG1035). However, whilst Thomas Girtin (1874–1960) and David Loshak dated that drawing to 1797, they listed this view of the gateway to as dating from 1800–1801 (Girtin and Loshak, 1954, p.191). This suggestion was followed by David Brown in his catalogue of the collection of British drawings in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Noting the way in which the artist ‘retouched’ the signature in the lower left corner, employing a darker tone of graphite over a much fainter ‘Girtin’, Brown added that it was not just the signature that had been ‘reworked with a stronger line’ but that the image as a whole was the result of adding to ‘a drawing of some five years earlier’ (Brown, 1982, p.340). Initially, I was sceptical about this idea, as there are no precedents for Girtin systematically reworking a sketch, but comparing the drawing with the more even-toned view of the west porch, which appears to have been produced around 1796, suggests that Girtin did indeed revisit the drawing, adding a series of darker highlights with a richer-toned piece of graphite. Something akin to the rather bland architectural record seen in the earlier drawing of the west porch was consequently transformed into a more showy piece of draughtsmanship, a commodity that might appeal to collectors of the artist’s works. The way the artist reinforced the strength of the signature is both evidence of the transformation process and a sign of the shift in the function of the drawing, therefore: from a record of an architectural subject, which might be used as the basis for a watercolour, to an example of the artist’s skills aimed at patrons who sought out examples of his sketching practice and for whom a signature was an essential component. And it was presumably at this stage that the artist added the female figure to the right, with a line depicting the ground showing through her clothes as further evidence of the process of reworking an earlier drawing.
Despite the artist’s efforts, the drawing does not appear to have found a purchaser as it appears, according to family tradition, to have come from the collection of Girtin’s son, Thomas Calvert Girtin (1801–74), and it is presumed that he inherited it from amongst works left in the artist’s possession after his death. The problem may have resulted because of Girtin’s choice of a rather obscure subject, part of the northern facade of the late fourteenth-century gateway to the abbey. Unusually for Girtin, the artist inscribed a note identifying the building, and without this it is unlikely that we would have recognised it as St Albans, not least as the gateway’s most distinctive feature, its use of flint, is not indicated in the drawing in any way. Potential purchasers may also have been put off by the way in which the drawing has ruled lines on all four sides, perhaps indicating that Girtin wished to rotate the drawing slightly and trim the composition. Using basic image-editing software, it is possible to do just that, and the results show a definite improvement in terms of the focus of the composition (see figure 1), prompting the thought that Girtin actually undertook to enhance his earlier sketch for his own purposes and that perhaps he had in mind to transfer his drawing himself, perhaps as a soft-ground etching. It is a bit of a long shot, but the sketch of St Albans has something of the show-off quality of the pencil drawing of An Inn Yard, Edgware Road, Paddington (TG1747), which has plausibly been identified as being produced for reproduction in a drawing manual. The reason for transforming the pencil drawing would still have been to illustrate the artist’s skill as a draughtsman, but perhaps this was intended to be communicated through a publication rather than a sale on the open market, therefore.
The only other view of the medieval gateway at St Albans that I have been able to trace, a watercolour of 1795 by Thomas Hearne (1744–1817) taken from exactly the same position (Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2932–1876)), suggests the reason for Girtin’s unusual and partial view of the structure. A large part of the structure was obscured by a tree and the stonework shown by Girtin is therefore the only area that was visible to the artist.
1796
The Interior of St Albans Abbey
TG1040
(?) 1796
St Albans Abbey: The West Porch
TG1035
1801
An Inn Yard, Edgware Road, Paddington
TG1747