- Description
-
- Creator(s)
- Thomas Girtin (1775-1802)
- Title
-
- The Sawmill, Cassiobury Park
- Date
- 1800 - 1801
- Medium and Support
- Graphite and watercolour on paper
- Dimensions
- 49.5 × 95.3 cm, 19 ½ × 37 ½ in
- Object Type
- Commissioned from Thomas Girtin; Studio Watercolour
- Subject Terms
- Hertfordshire; Wind and Water Mills
-
- Collection
- Catalogue Number
- TG1571
- Girtin & Loshak Number
- 326 as 'In Moor Park, Hertfordshire'; '1799'
- Description Source(s)
- Viewed in 2001
Provenance
George Capel-Coningsby, 5th Earl of Essex (1757–1839); ... William Leader (1767–1828); ... Edward Cohen (1816–87) (lent to London, 1875); sold to Puttick & Simpson, 12 July 1879; ... Charles Fairfax Murray; his sale, Christie's, 14 December 1917, lot 21 as ‘A Woody Landscape, with farm buildings, and a peasant seated’; J. Palser & Sons; bought by Claude Tryon (d.1949), 7 April 1919; his sale, Christie's, 15 December 1939, lot 47 as 'A Woody Landscape, with a mill: a peasant seated in the foreground'; bought by Frederick Meatyard, £47 5s; Fine Art Society, London, 1947-48; bought by Watford Library; transferred to Watford Museum, 1981
Exhibition History
London, 1875, no.43 as ’Trees and Old Mill’; Fine Art Society, 1948, no.89 as ’In Cassiobury Park’; Watford, 1975, no.66; Watford, 1985, no number
Bibliography
Harwood, 1992, no.52, p.35; Rabbitts and Priestley, 2014, p.83
Place depicted
Other entries in Edward Lascelles and Harewood, Together with Other Houses of the Gentry
The Summer House in the Garden of Samuel Wood at Southgate
Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford
Alnwick Castle, from Brizlee
Private Collection, Northumberland
Ships in a Harbour, Possibly at Bristol
Harewood House, Yorkshire
An Estuary Scene, Probably in the West Country
Harewood House, Yorkshire
A Mountain View, near Beddgelert
National Museum of Wales, Cardiff
A Circular Temple, Said to Be in Harewood Park
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven
A Lake Scene with Cattle, Said to Be in Harewood Park
Private Collection
A Close View of Harewood House, from the South East
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven
Harewood House, from the South West
Harewood House, Yorkshire
Harewood House, from the South East
Harewood House, Yorkshire
Buildings on the River Nidd, near Knaresborough
Toledo Museum of Art
Plumpton Rocks, near Knaresborough
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
On the River Wharfe at Bolton Abbey
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
A Reconstruction of the Elizabethan Wing of Moreton Corbet Castle
Private Collection
A Reconstruction of Moreton Corbet Castle, from the West
Private Collection
A Landscape with an Unidentified House
Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery
An Unidentified House in an Open Landscape
Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart
An Unidentified Small Country House or Lodge
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven
The North Front of Chalfont Lodge, Seen from the Lake
Private Collection
The South Front of Chalfont Lodge, Seen from across the Lawn
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven
The South Front of Chalfont Lodge, Seen from across the Lawn
Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery
Chalfont House, from the North East, with Fishermen Netting the Broadwater
Private Collection, Herefordshire
Chalfont House, from the North West
Private Collection, Herefordshire
Melville Castle
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven
A Distant View of Arundel Castle, from the South
Private Collection, Sussex
A Lake Surrounded by Trees, Known as 'The Silent Pool'
Private Collection
A Lake Scene with Two Herons, Possibly in Cassiobury Park
Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery
Hatfield House, from the South East
British Museum, London
A House and Garden at Winster in Derbyshire
British Museum, London
A House at Winster
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
An Unidentified Georgian House, Said to Be Lobes Hill in Shropshire
Private Collection
A Distant View of a Castle, Said to Be Lowther in Westmorland
Private Collection
An Ornamental Ruin in a Park; A Tree on a Mound
British Museum, London
A Distant View of Knaresborough, from the South East
The Whitworth, University of Manchester
Guisborough Priory: The Ruined East End
National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh
Jedburgh from the River, with the Abbey Beyond
National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin
Footnotes
- 1 Thornbury’s biography of Turner includes extensive anecdotal detail about Girtin’s life and career. Although the text is often frankly fanciful in character, it does contain some useful details and the sections relating to Girtin have been transcribed in the Documents section of the Archive.(1862 – Item 1)
Revisions & Feedback
The website will be updated from time to time and, when changes are made, a PDF of the previous version of each page will be archived here for consultation and citation.
Please help us to improve this catalogue
If you have information, a correction or any other suggestions to improve this catalogue, please contact us.
About this Work
This sadly faded watercolour was commissioned by Girtin’s important late patron George Capel-Coningsby, 5th Earl of Essex (1757–1839), and it shows a view on his estate at Cassiobury in Hertfordshire. It depicts the river Gade, which runs through the park, with an adjacent mill that was only demolished as recently as 1956 – likely a sawmill though it has also been described as a ‘horse-drawn treadmill’ (Rabbitts and Priestley, 2014, p.83). The watercolour dates from around 1800, just about the time that the Earl of Essex was commissioning James Wyatt (1746–1813) to remodel the house in the Gothic style, and Humphry Repton (1752–1818) was employed to oversee changes in the park that were to culminate in the building of a series of lodges and other picturesque buildings. The project was presumably not far enough advanced by this stage for any of these developments to be apparent in the works that Girtin produced for the earl (such as TG1570), and it was left to the artist’s contemporary Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) to record Essex’s efforts to modernise the estate and the house (see figure 1). The fact that Girtin instead concentrated on the working estate did not mean that he compromised his own ambitions, however. This is one of the largest watercolours the artist ever produced, and it was no doubt designed from the outset to be part of a grand decorative display for the interior at Cassiobury. Works on a comparable scale, such as Harewood House, from the South East (TG1548), were attached to a wooden stretcher like an oil painting on canvas and they were then close-framed and glazed, and it is likely that this was how the view of the estate’s sawmill was displayed too.
It is not known when Girtin first came into contact with the Earl of Essex, though we can discount the apocryphal story that it was he who came to the rescue of the young apprentice, who, according to Walter Thornbury (1828–76), was languishing in jail at the behest of his unscrupulous master, Edward Dayes (1763–1804) (Thornbury, 1862, vol.1, pp.102–3).1 I suspect that we should also discount this early biographer’s flattering testimony that genius finds favour with the great and powerful and, specifically, his suggestion that the artist was a regular guest of the earl at Cassiobury, just as he was said to have been favoured with his own room at Harewood House by Edward Lascelles (1764–1814). In fact, Cassiobury was easily accessible from London, and it is more likely that Girtin explored the estate on day trips. Moreover, it has also proved difficult to substantiate the claims about the patron’s significance for Girtin’s career. The twenty ‘Paris Drawings’ he owned were purchased after the artist’s death, and in any case they have been shown to be a set of hand-coloured etchings made by the artist as a presentation set (Smith, 2017–18, pp.36–38), whilst only two watercolours have conclusively been traced from the collection at Cassiobury (see TG1570). None of the six watercolours by Girtin that Essex lent to an exhibition at the Society of Painters in Water Colours in 1823 have been identified, for instance, and it seems that these works, and possibly others, left his collection in an as yet unidentified way (Exhibitions: SPWC, 1823). Until that is uncovered, making a final judgement about his significance for the artist is fraught with difficulty.
1798 - 1800
A Lake Scene with Two Herons, Possibly in Cassiobury Park
TG1570
(?) 1801
Harewood House, from the South East
TG1548
1798 - 1800
A Lake Scene with Two Herons, Possibly in Cassiobury Park
TG1570