Date: 11-08-2002
Owning Institution: Tate Britain
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”      
Subject: 18th Century        

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, a horizontal air mill, a white house (roughly where Battersea Park is now to be found), Battersea Bridge and Chelsea Old Church. But the recording of these details is incidental to the artist’s deeper purposes. He has no more than a passing interest in the specifics of place. His true subject is a particular, evanescent effect of the light.

Everything in the painting speaks of mutability, a theme naturally adapted to expression in the medium of watercolour, laid down as it is here in broad, fluid layers. The river’s placid surface is awash with subtly shifting colours. The billowing grey and pink clouds in the sky shape another pattern of change. Two boats are present in the scene, one unrigged and at anchor, the other on the move, ripples from its wake breaking up the filigree of its reflected form. At the heart of this stilled summer evening idyll – like “a brilliant note introduced into a sweet melody,” as Girtin’s contemporary, the author John Stoddart, described it – the artist placed the sunlit white house of his picture’s title. It gleams with an uncanny brightness, echoed and intensified by the long shivering rectangle of light formed by its reflection in the Thames.

 Girtin had an austere, idealising temperament which was reflected in the daring broadness of his mature style, with its elimination of extraneous detail. He is said to have preferred to use thick Dutch cartridge paper, working on its rougher, ridged side, because its coarseness naturally discouraged a fussy and minute finish. He was probably influenced by the Discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds, who advised young painters to select from nature’s beauties rather than attempt merely to depict what lay before their eyes. The practical example of Dutch landscape art was equally important to him, especially the prints and drawings of Rembrandt, from whose small but panoramic views of Amsterdam he learned the trick of using an expanse of water, or of void space, to eliminate foreground minutiae.

But the trembling, luminous texture of The White House at Chelsea was unique to Girtin. So too was the daring with which he devised an entire image around a single, prominent highlight (created in fact by adding just the tiniest amount of body colour to a patch of cream-coloured paper otherwise left bare). In doing so, he created the tantalising impression of a half-grasped revelation, striving to make itself known – the glimmering sense that here, now, in this sunlit moment, some meaningful pattern or order has emerged from the continuum of experience. The mystery what that might be is intensified by the fact that the building so suddenly illuminated by Girtin’s evening sun is no well-known topographical landmark, no famous church or cathedral, but just an ordinary house on a nondescript stretch of the Thames.

Nineteenth-century writers of a romantic tendency used to explain the enigma of the picture by saying that Girtin had seen, in the evanescent vision of the sunlit house, a premonition of his own death. Such hypotheses have the dubious advantage of being unverifiable. It seems just as likely that if the house does represent Girtin in some metaphorical sense, its meaning could be political: a left-wing artist’s way of expressing his democratic belief that true merit can shine forth from even the lowliest dwelling. But that too seems a little crude. Girtin’s painting continues to fascinate because it so perfectly encapsulates the way in which beauty can suddenly emerge from nowhere, puzzling us with its inexplicability. Is God smiling, or is it just a trick of the light? The painter leaves us to judge.