- Description
-
- Creator(s)
- (?) Thomas Girtin (1775-1802)
- Title
-
- The West Front of St Martin-in-the-Fields
- Date
- 1790 - 1791
- Object Type
- Drawing for a Print
- Subject Terms
- London Architecture
-
- Collection
- Catalogue Number
- TG0037
- Description Source(s)
- The original known only from the print
Place depicted
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British Museum, London
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Private Collection
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Chepstow Castle, on the River Wye
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
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Leicester Museum & Art Gallery
A Distant View of Hereford Cathedral
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The Gatehouse and Barbican, Warwick Castle
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
Chepstow Castle, from the River Wye
Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford
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The Transept of St Saviour’s, Southwark
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven
Part of the Ruins of the Savoy Palace, Westminster Bridge Beyond
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven
Durham Cathedral, from the River Wear
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Tate, London
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About this Work
The drawing from which this engraving was published in June 1795 has not been traced. The print is only inscribed with the name of the publisher, Charles Taylor (1756–1823), and were it not for the fact that six of the first nine engravings included in his periodical, The Temple of Taste, were made from signed drawings by Girtin, it is unlikely that this or the other fifteen or so prints of architectural subjects from unidentified sources would have been associated with the artist. The simple and crude elevation, the unconvincing perspective of the spire and the surrounding buildings, and the out-of-proportion figures might be explained by the use of a drawing produced by a young and inexperienced apprentice, however, and Girtin’s drawings for the series appear to date from as early as 1790 or 1791.
Views of St Martin-in-the-Fields, built between 1721 and 1726, require careful composition if they are not to be partial, especially as the site was even more enclosed in the 1790s than it is today. Taylor chose a view that showed off the elegant spire and the architect James Gibbs’ (1682–1754) finest architectural achievement, the classical ‘Portico’. This, Taylor argued, was a ‘happy application of the Portico of the Temple of Antinus and Faustina, as an entry to a Christian church’ – a building, incidentally, that Girtin was to depict a few years later (TG0888).
1799 - 1800
Rome: The Temple of Antoninus and Faustina
TG0888