This slight pencil sketch, showing the elaborate spire of St Bride’s, Fleet Street, with other buildings adjacent to the north end of Blackfriars Bridge, has only recently been associated with Girtin’s London panorama (Smith, 2018, p.60). The unvaried touch suggested to Susan Morris that it dated from as early as around 1793, missing the point that the style was determined by its utilitarian role in the production of the Eidometropolis (Morris, 1986, p.35). The church features in section six of the 360-degree London view (TG1859), and there is no doubt that this is a study for part of the Middlesex bank, immediately west of Blackfriars Bridge, and that it therefore replicates a small section of the larger drawing. Unlike the other pencil studies that Girtin made in preparation for the painting of his London panorama, this work does not include a grid, but it is on the same scale as the outline drawings, six out of the seven of which survive (Smith, 2018, p.45). The on-the-spot drawings, which were almost certainly made with the aid of a perspective frame, were passed to the artist’s assistants, whose task it was to transfer Girtin’s outlines onto a canvas that, according to the advertisements taken out by the artist, measured ‘1944 square feet’ (about 180 square metres) – that is, 18 ft high (5.5 m) with a circumference of 108 ft (5.5 × 33 m) – so it is likely that this detail was created to clarify an area that was unclear in the larger study (Smith, 2018, p.60). It is to be expected that such a complex collaborative venture required other studies from the artist, and these perhaps included another view of St Paul’s, which is left relatively undefined in the view of Blackfriars Bridge. 

(?) 1801

Blackfriars Bridge and St Paul’s Cathedral: Outline Study for the ‘Eidometropolis’, Section Six

TG1859