Collection: Art prints by Thomas Girtin

Thomas Girtin is considered one of the most talented and promising artists of his generation - a painter and watercolorist whose early work changed English landscape art so profoundly that Turner himself, his contemporary and lifelong benchmark, once remarked that had Girtin lived longer, he himself would have been forgotten. Whether this statement was meant literally or not, it impressively testifies to the status Girtin held in the eyes of those who knew him.

Born in London in 1775, Girtin received his artistic training as a draughtsman and watercolorist, initially from a topographer and later through intensive work from old master models in the collection of art patron Thomas Monro, where he regularly worked together with Turner. This early training in copying and penetrating the works of others gave him a foundation in the craft that he soon began to surpass. Travels through England, Wales and Scotland provided him with the repertoire of motifs from which he drew his most important works, and a trip to Paris shortly before his death left him with a group of city views that are among the most impressive testimonies to his art.

What makes Girtin so significant in the history of English watercolor is the determination with which he liberated the medium from its illustrative past and elevated it to an independent means of artistic expression. Before Girtin, watercolor in England was largely an aid to topographical drawing: precise, informative, painterly and modest. Girtin transformed it into something fundamentally different. He worked on rough, unprimed paper, used a restrained, earthy-toned color palette of brown, ochre, grey and blue-grey and applied broad, confident brushstrokes that lent the sheet an immediacy and force that watercolor had hardly known until then. He created light not by glazing and brightening, but by deliberately leaving the paper bare - a technique that gives his paintings a freshness and directness that is still convincing today.

The character of his works is characterized by a generosity and stillness that makes one forget his short life. Castle ruins under a wide sky, river landscapes in diffuse morning light, cityscapes with long shadows and silent pavements - Girtin treats these motifs with a calmness and self-assurance that goes far beyond his age. His compositions are open and airy, his spaces deep and convincing, his atmosphere always concrete and at the same time with a poetic indeterminacy that invites the viewer to linger in the picture. His best works create the rare feeling of not looking at a watercolor, but actually standing in that landscape, on that morning, in that light.

Thomas Girtin died in London in 1802, aged just twenty-seven, as a result of a lung disease. His oeuvre comprises only a few hundred sheets, but these are enough to secure his place in the history of English art. Today he is considered one of the founders of modern English watercolor, whose concise, atmospheric pictorial language had a lasting influence not only on Turner, but on the entire development of English landscape art in the 19th century - an artist whose early death deprived art history of a development whose extent can only be guessed at.