Girtin, Thomas 1775-1802
English painter

He was a close friend and a contemporary of J M W Turner, with whom he worked in the studio of John Raphael Smith (1750-1812), colouring prints. He painted some of his best landscapes in the north of England and in France, which he visited in 1801-02 for his health. His paintings were among the first in which watercolour was exploited as a true medium as distinct from a tint for colouring drawings, as in The White House at Chelsea (1800, Tate, London). His breadth of vision was in sharp contrast to the detailed fussiness of the majority of early watercolourists, and he was one of the greatest of the earlier landscape painters in watercolours. He influenced John Constable considerably.