Thomas Girtin

Girtin learnt drawing as a boy (attending classes with Thomas Malton), and was apprenticed to the topographical watercolourist Edward Dayes.

In 1800, Girtin married Mary Ann Borrett, the 16-year-old daughter of a wealthy City goldsmith, and set up home in St George's Row, Hyde Park, next door to the painter Paul Sandby.

He made a series the pencil sketches that he engraved on his return to London, and which were posthumously published as Twenty Views in Paris and its Environs.

Girtin's early landscapes are akin to 18th-century topographical sketches, but in later years he developed a bolder, more spacious, romantic style, which had a lasting influence on English painting.

[4] In July 2002 Tate Britain organised an exhibition, Thomas Girtin: The Art of Watercolour which aimed to "reveal his technical genius".

[5] An online catalogue raisonné of the artist, edited by Greg Smith, was published by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in 2022.