[Born in Southwark, 1775; apprenticed to Edward Dayes; first engravings after his drawings published in “Copper Plate Magazine,” 1793; sketching tours, in the Midlands (Lichfield, etc.), 1794, Kent and Sussex 1795, Yorkshire and Scotland 1796, Devonshire 1797, Wales 1798, Yorkshire and Scotland 1799; “Girtin’s Sketching Society” established, 1799; married, 1800; went to Paris, Nov. 1801, and returned to England, May 1802; his _Eidometropolis_, or Great Panorama of London, exhibited at Spring Gardens, August, 1802; died Nov. 9, 1802; engravings of his views of Paris published shortly after his death. EXHIBITED: Royal Academy, 1794, ’95, ’97-1801. WORKS IN PUBLIC GALLERIES: V. and A. Museum (Water-Colours); British Museum; National Galleries of Scotland and Ireland; Manchester Whitworth Institute; Ashmolean and Fitzwilliam Museums; Oldham Art Gallery (Charles E. Lees’ Collection). BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES: Edwards’s “Anecdotes”; Dayes’ “Professional Sketches”; Redgrave’s “Century” and “Dictionary”; B.F.A. Club’s Catalogue, 1875; Roget’s “History”; Binyon’s “Life and Works,” 1900; Walpole Society’s Vols. II. and V. REPRODUCTIONS: Binyon’s “Life”; Monkhouse’s, Finberg’s, Hughes’s, Lytton’s, and Rich’s works already cited; THE STUDIO (Centenary of Thomas Girtin Number), Nov. 1902; THE STUDIO, May 1916; Walpole Society’s Vols. II. and V.] Compared with John Cozens’s work Girtin’s appears often self-conscious and artificial. His drawings were admired by his contemporaries chiefly on account of their style; references to the “sword-play” of his pencil, the boldness and swiftness of his washes, constantly recur in their eulogies of his work. Girtin was nearly always a stylist, and often a mannerist. But his style, at its best, is so thoroughly in keeping with the spirit of his work that it is difficult to separate the two. His love of the sweeping lines of the open moorland and his passion for height and space appeal irresistibly to our imagination, while the broad simplicity of his vision, his restrained and truthful colour, and his frank, bold, decisive handling seem the only adequate means by which his inspiration could find clear and authoritative expression. We must remember, too, that Girtin died at the age of twenty-seven. The knowledge of his early and untimely death intensifies our admiration for all he did; while the few supreme masterpieces of poetical landscape he has left us, like the _Plinlimmon_, show clearly what our national art lost by the tragedy of his early death.