- Description
-
- Creator(s)
- Thomas Girtin (1775-1802)
- Title
-
- The Interior of St Albans Abbey
- Date
- 1796
- Medium and Support
- Graphite and watercolour on wove paper
- Dimensions
- 54.8 × 42 cm, 21 ⅝ × 16 ½ in
- Inscription
‘Thos Girtin -96’ lower right, by Thomas Girtin
- Object Type
- Exhibition Watercolour; Studio Watercolour
- Subject Terms
- Gothic Architecture: Cathedral View; Hertfordshire
-
- Collection
-
- Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery
- (FAW 533)
- Versions
-
An Interior View of St Albans Abbey, from the Crossing
(TG1039)
- Catalogue Number
- TG1040
- Girtin & Loshak Number
- 136ii as 'St. Alban's Cathedral'
- Description Source(s)
- Viewed in 2001 and 2002
Provenance
Charles Hampden Turner (1772-1856); Christie’s, 9 June 1873, lot 204 as 'Interior of Winchester Cathedral "1796"’; bought by 'Noseda', £72 9s; bought by Edward Cohen (1816–87), £84 (lent to London, 1875); then by bequest to his niece, Annie Sophia Poulter (c.1846–1924); then by descent to Edward Alexander Poulter (1883–1973); Thos. Agnew & Sons, 1931 (stock no.1226); Lt-Col Kenneth Morland Agnew (1886–1951); his sale, Sotheby's, 25 November 1942, lot 9a; bought by the Fine Art Society, London, £350; Edwin Leach Hartley (1864–1954); bequeathed to the Museum, 1954
Exhibition History
Royal Academy, London, 1797, no.428 as ’Inside of St. Alban’s Cathedral Church’; London, 1875, no.98 as ’Interior of Winchester Cathedral’ and wrongly dated ’1795’; London, 1886, no.4; Agnew’s, 1931, no.122 as ’Interior of St Alban’s Cathedral’; Agnew’s, 1936, no.91; Agnew’s, 1939, no.153; Agnew’s, 1953a, no.72; London, 2002, no.48
Bibliography
The Builder, 5 June 1875; London News, 7 February 1953
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 East
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

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

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

St James’s Park, with Westminster Abbey in the Distance
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
Hawes Fine Art

London: The Leathersellers’ Hall
British Museum, London

London: The Interior of the Ruins of the Leathersellers’ Hall
British Museum, London

Pinckney’s Farm, Radwinter
Victoria and Albert Museum, London

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, University of Manchester

A House Seen across a Lake, 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

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

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

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

Old London Bridge, with the Shot Tower in Construction, and St Olave's Church
Private Collection
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About this Work
This view of the choir of St Albans Abbey, viewed from the crossing, is one of only a handful of church interiors painted by Girtin. Though a slightly larger version of the composition, taken from a marginally different angle, also exists, there is some doubt about the attribution of that work (TG1039). Girtin exhibited a watercolour with the title ‘Inside of St. Alban’s Cathedral Church’ at the Royal Academy in 1797, and, given its imposing scale, the careful execution of an unusually wide range of figures and the fact that it is dated, it is likely to have been this work that was shown (Exhibitions: Royal Academy, London, 1797, no.428). Girtin’s title is one of a number of puzzling features about this drawing. St Albans only acquired its cathedral status later in the nineteenth century, and in the 1790s it was a pale shadow of its medieval glory. Following the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the sixteenth century, the abbey lost many of its greatest treasures, and the building was acquired by the townspeople, who fitted up the area from the crossing tower to the high altar screen as a parish church, leaving the rest of the structure to deteriorate. Girtin’s view therefore records not only the great medieval church but also the heterogeneous mix of its later furnishings, which subsequent restorations have swept away, including the wooden pews and panelling, the flamboyant Baroque pulpit, and Sir James Thornhill’s (1675/76–1734) painting The Last Supper, which then adorned the high altar. A comparison with Girtin’s other major watercolour of an important church interior, a view of Exeter Cathedral that was commissioned by James Moore (1762–99) (TG1256), points up the unconventional nature of this earlier image. Thus, whilst the Exeter view carefully records the architectural glories of the great Gothic monument, this watercolour not only concentrates on the modern church fittings but also gives a significant role to the figures attending the service. The attention of the very sparse congregation has in many cases wandered and, rather disarmingly, at least two have turned their attention towards the viewer, and one cannot help but speculate about the interaction between the various component groups of figures. However inappropriate it might have been in a watercolour destined for the walls of the Academy’s annual exhibition, it seems that Girtin added a narrative element to this record of the interior of the church, and it is hard not to believe that this was in some way critical of the state of the Church as an institution.
This particular watercolour did not attract any attention either positive or negative, however, when it appeared at the Academy, though one critic did note that in general the ‘Artist is careless in the detail and finishing’ (St. James’s Chronicle, 20 – 23 May 1797). None of Girtin’s ten exhibits that year were marked as being for sale, and it is likely that his view of St Albans was a commission and that its unconventional imagery therefore reflected the interests of someone for whom the church had personal associations. Nothing is known about the early provenance of the watercolour, though we can form a reasonable estimate of its cost to the unknown patron. The Academician and diarist Joseph Farington (1747–1821) noted that Girtin’s drawings at the smaller size of ‘18 Inches’, such as The West Front of Jedburgh Abbey (TG1231) sold for ‘4 guineas’ (Farington, Diary, 4 June 1797). The Interior of St Albans Abbey is larger and more carefully worked, and its cost was no doubt further inflated by the need for Girtin to travel to the city to make detailed sketches from which to execute the watercolour since, as in the case of the view of Exeter, it is unlikely that he painted his view from the work of another artist. Indeed, two drawings titled ‘Choir, St Alban’s Abbey’ were recorded in an early sale of the artist’s work (Exhibitions: Christie’s, 18 April 1836, lots 177 and 178), though these have not been traced.
A watercolour with the title ‘Interior of St. Albans’ was sold at the artist’s posthumous sale for £6 (Exhibitions: Christie’s, 1 June 1803, lot 123). This seems to be too little for such an important watercolour as this, but there is a possibility that it was this work and that it therefore had remained in the artist’s hands unsold. It would be very satisfying to discover that the idiosyncratic cast of figures noted above had caused problems between artist and patron, but without further evidence, which indeed is unlikely to emerge, that must remain a wholly unsubstantiated speculation.
Girtin’s imposing watercolour, now held at Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery, was the subject of two full-scale copies, one of which at least has a claim to be a replica by the artist himself, despite its long-standing attribution to Edward Dayes (1763–1804) (see figure 1). That watercolour copy, now in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, has exactly the same dimensions, repeats the same complex groups of figures and, as the process of overlaying images of the two works demonstrates, replicates the composition exactly. The congruence between the two images is such that were it not for the fact that the watercolour in Blackburn is signed and dated – suggesting that it is the work that was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1797 – it would by no means be clear which is the ‘original’. Arguably, the drawing at Boston is less thickly worked, which at this early stage in the research on the watercolour seems to confirm that it is Girtin’s second version of the drawing, in which case he may have received a commission following the exhibition of the Blackburn work in 1797. A certain economy in its production is to my eye the only thing to distinguish the two watercolours, and I suspect that it should join the significant list of examples of Girtin producing close replicas of his own works, including Wetherby: Looking through the Bridge to the Mills (TG1643 and TG1644) and Paris: The Ruins of the Roman Baths, Hôtel de Cluny (TG1896 and TG1897). The second version of the watercolour in the Deanery, St Albans Abbey is not so clearly by Girtin; though it is also large in scale, my first impressions are that it is by a unknown copyist.
1792 - 1793
An Interior View of St Albans Abbey, from the Crossing
TG1039
1797
The Interior of Exeter Cathedral, Looking from the Nave
TG1256
1796 - 1797
The West Front of Jedburgh Abbey
TG1231
(?) 1800
Wetherby: Looking through the Bridge to the Mills
TG1643
(?) 1800
Wetherby: Looking through the Bridge to the Mills
TG1644
(?) 1802
Paris: The Ruins of the Roman Baths, Hôtel de Cluny
TG1896
(?) 1802
Paris: The Ruins of the Roman Baths, Hôtel de Cluny
TG1897