Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 28, 2025
He was a curious result of the influence of the old masters on a strongly individual English mind, inclined to nature worship, born in England in the epoch of the poetic English school to which Girtin, Turner, and their colleagues belonged, and migrating to America in boyhood, early enough to become impressed by the influence of primitive nature as a subject of art.
Turner himself used to say that his best academy was "the fields and Dr Monro's parlour" where Girtin and other young artists met and sketched and copied the drawings in the doctor's collection. Burnet, in his notice of "Turner and his Works," suggests that John Robert Cozens had paved the way for both Girtin and Turner in striking out a broad effect of light and shade.
These were succeeded by Thomas Girtin, who was born in 1775 and died at twenty-seven years of age; and the great J. M. W. Turner, who first saw the light in the same year, and on the day on which all great Englishmen should be born namely, April 23 a day dedicated to St. George and the birthday of William Shakespeare. Girtin and Turner worked together.
Turner was also employed to sketch from nature in all directions about London. In these tasks he had for a constant companion "Honest Tom Girtin," a young fellow of Turner's own age, who afterward married a wealthy lady, had rich patrons, and died before he was thirty. Had he lived to mature years, Girtin would have been a powerful rival to Turner.
He always spoke kindly of him as 'poor Tom! Of one of his drawings in the British Museum, Turner said, 'I never in my whole life could make a drawing like that; I would at any time have given one of my little fingers to have made such a one. At another time he said, 'If Tom Girtin had lived, I should have starved! Girtin died in 1802; in the same year Turner was made a Royal Academician; he had been two years before admitted to the honours of Associateship.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking