- Description
-
- Creator(s)
- Thomas Girtin (1775-1802)
- Title
-
- The Ogwen Falls
- Date
- (?) 1798
- Medium and Support
- Graphite on wove paper
- Dimensions
- 22 × 18.4 cm, 8 ⅝ × 7 ¼ in
- Inscription
‘Girtin’ lower centre, by Thomas Girtin
- Object Type
- Outline Drawing
- Subject Terms
- North Wales; Waterfall Scenery
-
- Collection
- Versions
-
The Ogwen Falls
(TG1330)
- Catalogue Number
- TG1329
- Girtin & Loshak Number
- 432i as 'The Gorge of Wathenlath with the Falls of Lodore'; '1801'
- Description Source(s)
- Viewed in 2024
Provenance
Henry Melville Gaskell (1879–1954), by 1929; then by descent
Exhibition History
Kendal, 1980, no.131 as 'The Gorge of Wathenlath'; Grasmere, 1986, no.126 as ’The Gorge of Watendlath with the Falls of Lodore, Derwentwater, Cumberland’; ’c.1801’
Bibliography
Girtin and Loshak, 1954, p.82; Smith, 2022b, p.157 as 'The Falls of the Ogwen, North Wales'
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
Interior View of 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
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About this Work
This pencil sketch of the Ogwen Falls, located near the road between Capel Curig and the North Wales coast, was made by Girtin in the summer of 1798, and it formed the basis of an impressive studio watercolour commissioned by Edward Lascelles (1764–1814) (TG1330). The view was for many years misidentified with the title ‘The Gorge of Wathenlath with the Falls of Lodore’ and dated to 1801, which was when Thomas Girtin (1874–1960) and David Loshak mistakenly believed that Girtin visited the Lake District (Girtin and Loshak, 1954, pp.82 and 193). However, in 2001 Paul Joyner suggested to me in a letter that the view shows ‘the Ogwen Falls or Falls of the Benlog cascading from Llyn Ogwen’, and, though he expressed some reservations about the identification, I am sure that any discrepancies between the topography of the site and Girtin’s drawing can be accounted for by the artist’s desire to produce an image that works effectively as a composition. Features such as the long descent of the falls in stages, their disposition in relation to the surrounding rocks, and the fact that they are constituted from two separate sources joining at different levels (the rivers Idwal and Ogwen) all support Joyner’s new identification. Further confirmation of this is not helped by the fact that, though the falls are located near a route taken by many visitors to North Wales, views are relatively rare, and I have not been able to trace either a print or a drawing that predates Girtin’s sketch. Given that Girtin was not the most curious of travellers, happy to follow in others’ footsteps and only then seek a new angle from which to depict a familiar view, I suspect that he was in this case directed towards his unfamiliar subject by another person, presumably his patron Lascelles, and that he therefore executed this pencil drawing with a commission already secured.
Girtin and Loshak’s misdating of this pencil drawing is particularly unfortunate because they used it as evidence of Girtin’s development as a draughtsman, and, specifically, his increasing use with maturity of a ‘vigorous hatching … divided into more or less distinct areas, varying in strength and direction’ (Girtin and Loshak, 1954, p.82). This indeed does describe the effect seen here, but knowing that the pencil drawing was made at the same time as the very different sketch Caernarfon: A Street Scene with Plas Mawr (TG1313) indicates that the contrast stemmed not from any stylistic development but from the different pictorial requirements of a rocky landscape and a picturesque architectural subject. In general, the landscape sketches Girtin made in Wales tend to be in the form of colour studies, but in this case the weather and light conditions under which he viewed the falls presumably did not warrant the extra labour involved, and he seems to have been content to make a pencil drawing that fixed the general forms of the landscape together with the contrasting textures of tree, rock and water.
A pencil sketch by Girtin’s contemporary Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851), also from 1798 and currently titled North Wales: A Waterfall, Rocks and Houses (see figure 1), seems to show the same view from a slightly different angle so that the house appears further to the right. According to Joseph Farington (1747–1821), Turner travelled to ‘South & North Wales this Summer’, and he told the diarist that he was ‘alone and on Horseback – out 7 weeks’. Given that the artist was not reported to be back in London until late September, it is clear that although Turner sketched many of the same subjects as Girtin, they did so independently, with the former’s visit to the Nant Ffrancon valley taking place a month or so later. The weather, Turner noted, included ‘much rain’, but this was ‘better for effects’, and indeed for the flow of water in the region’s numerous waterfalls, as Girtin’s sketch attests (Farington, Diary, 26 September 1798).
1798 - 1799
The Ogwen Falls
TG1330
(?) 1798
Caernarfon: A Street Scene with Plas Mawr (The Great House)
TG1313