This view from the north bank of the river Arno in Florence, looking towards the convent of Monte Oliveto, was copied from a composition by John Robert Cozens (1752–97) (see figure 1). Although the watercolour has been attributed to Cozens himself, it displays many of the signs that it was produced at the home of Dr Thomas Monro (1759–1833), where Girtin and his contemporary Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) were employed across three winters, probably between 1794 and 1797, to make ‘finished drawings’ from the ‘Copies’ of the ‘outlines or unfinished drawings of Cozens’. The resulting watercolours saw the two artists engaged in a unique collaboration; as they later recalled, Girtin ‘drew in outlines and Turner washed in the effects’. ‘They went at 6 and staid till Ten’, and, as the diarist Joseph Farington (1747–1821) reported, Turner received ‘3s. 6d each night’, though ‘Girtin did not say what He had’ (Farington, Diary, 12 November 1798).¹

Cozens’ on-the-spot sketch is inscribed ‘Banks of ye Arno near Florence Septr.21. – from the Cascines’, meaning that it was made on the return from the artist’s second trip to the Continent, in the autumn of 1783 (Bell and Girtin, 1935, no.386). The sketch is found in the sixth of the seven sketchbooks from Cozens’ second Italian visit, which saw the artist travel to Naples in the company of his patron William Beckford (1760–1844). It is unlikely that the Monro School watercolour was copied directly from the sketch by Cozens, however. It would have been uncharacteristic of Beckford to have lent the sketchbooks to Monro, and the existence of a large number of tracings of their contents by Cozens himself suggests that the patron, rather than the artist, retained the books. An album put together by Sir George Beaumont (1753–1827), now in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, includes more than seventy tracings from on-the-spot drawings in the first three of the sketchbooks, and these provided the basis for at least thirty Monro School works. There are only five tracings from the next three books, but there is no reason to think that others did not exist, and it was presumably from these lost copies by Cozens that as many as thirty-five more watercolours were produced by Girtin and Turner, including at least two other views of Florence (TG0746 and TG752a) and two of the river Arno in its vicinity (TG0749 and TG0751). The fact that the Monro School copies never follow either the shading or the distribution of light seen in the on-the-spot sketches, though they always replicate the basic outlines, further suggests that Girtin and Turner worked from tracings of the sketchbook views.

The attribution of this work to Turner and Girtin, rather than to Cozens himself, is far from clear-cut and, as such, the work is a testament to Turner’s skill in transforming the source material. Overlaying images of the on-the-spot sketch and the watercolour reveals a close relationship between the two, and they match each other exactly for size. In the ninety or so watercolours that Cozens realised for Beckford from his on-the-spot sketches, such as Florence from the Cascine Park (see TG0746 figure 2), the artist both worked on a larger scale (roughly 26 × 37 cm, 10 ¼ × 14 ½ in) and incorporated extensive alterations to the composition to achieve the poetic effects that transformed the prosaic records that he had created on the spot. The fact that this work is, in contrast, a faithful rendering of Cozens’ composition paradoxically supports the idea that, like other watercolours that employ a relatively full palette, such as A Building amongst Trees, on the River Arno near Florence (TG0750), this too is a Monro School copy. Typically, these more carefully worked watercolours efface any sign of Girtin’s pencil work and, as in this case, we are left with the question of whether the work therefore departs from the general practice of the artists at Monro’s house. Although the point can never be proved, I suspect that Girtin was involved in its production, albeit at the most basic level, tracing the outlines from a Cozens drawing; it was Turner’s more onerous task to obscure the essentially mechanical practice of replication and produce something that approximates to a finished work.

Image Overlay

1794 - 1797

Florence: The Palazzo Vecchio, Seen from the Cascine Park

TG0746

1794 - 1797

A Villa on the Banks of the River Arno, Known as ‘The Villa Salviati’

TG0749

1794 - 1797

A View on the River Arno, with a Tower on a Hill

TG0751

1794 - 1797

A Building amongst Trees, on the River Arno near Florence

TG0750