The second of this month’s summer pictures is a watercolour by Thomas Girtin traditionally entitled The White House at Chelsea. The artist created the work in 1800. Two years later he died, aged just 27, from either asthma or tuberculosis. “Poor Tom”, his friend and contemporary, J.M.W. Turner, is said to have remarked. “If Tom Girtin had lived, I should have starved.” Turner regarded The White House at Chelsea as Girtin’s masterpiece. The work is exhibited only rarely, due to the fugitive and extremely light-sensitive nature of the vegetable-based pigments which the artist used. But it can currently be seen at Tate Britain, as part of a large retrospective exhibition commemorating the bicentenary of his death.
The son of a brushmaker, Girtin was born in Southwark, in the picturesquely named Bandy Leg Walk, in 1775. He grew up to be an independent-spirited young man, both in art and in politics, a freethinker whose sympathies are said to have inclined to the radical left. According to legend he spent much of his youth on and around the Thames, sailing and sketching on the barges which, in those days, used to crowd the river. In creating this watercolour he may, in some sense, have been revisiting the scenery of his childhood. But what is most immediately impressive about the work is the startling formal rigour of its composition. Mundane reality has been memorably transmuted into a perfectly satisfying arrangement of pictorial forms.
Between a golden twilit summer sky, and its equally golden reflection in the river’s gentle flow, the artist locates a narrow panoramic band of buildings. The topography of Girtin’s point of view can still be roughly reconstructed. Looking upstream from a spot close to where Chelsea Bridge now stands, he shows, from left to right, Joseph Freeman’s mill,...
