1848

The Encyclopaedia of the Fine Arts: Forming a Portion of the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, London, 1848, p.828

Future writers on English Art will have the duty of recording the rise and advancement of water-colour Painting in this Country, to a degree of excellence not hitherto considered attainable, until the talent and perseverance of a numerous School among the contemporaries or fellow-students of Thomas Girtin, called it forth. No true lover of the Arts in England but must be familiar with the names and merits of the "Society of Painters in Water Colours." We purposely abstain from remarks on living genius, but must observe of Girtin that he was one of the earliest and most successful improvers of the Art in question. For this purpose he found no necessity for foreign travel, but studied nature, English nature, at home. Like Rembrandt, Cuyp, Ruysdael, Hobbima, Paul Potter, and other great colourists of the Flemish and Dutch Schools, he found abundant exercise for a powerful mind, in scenes which pass unheeded before the vacant eyes of ordinary men. He visited Paris for his health in 1802, and made sketches of certain streets and public buildings of the French Capital, which, at his return to London, he etched and engraved in aquatinta. His death, however, that same year, removed a valuable contributor to this department of Engraving, and deprived water-colour Painting of one of its ablest founders.