Thomas Girtin: The Forgotten Painter

In lesser hands, Oscar Zárate’s graphic work would be nothing more than a biography about a contemporary of William Turner, whom, as the subtitle implies, most people have not heard about. Such a work would be useful, of course, if it pointed people to Girtin’s work, and his reputation during his life, possibly even resurrecting his career to the level of Turner, or even somewhere approaching it. However, Zárate is interested in much more than that, as he combines the life of Girtin with the fictional lives of three people who have connected over their love of art. By taking such an approach, Zárate asks much larger questions about the importance of art in one’s lives, the brevity of those lives, and the choices we all must make.

Arturo, Sarah, and Fred are all in the same community art class, where they spend most of their time drawing from live models. In fact, the opening scene of the work sets the stage for many of the themes Zárate will explore, as he moves through the thoughts of the three characters as they sketch two models. Thomas Girtin comes up and weaves throughout the book due to Fred’s interest in him. The three go to the pub after class, and Fred cannot stop talking about Girtin. Throughout the book, they have cookouts and dinners with each other where Fred tells them more of what he has learned about Girtin, while they also share about their lives.

However, rather than using a straightforward presentation about Girtin through Fred, Zárate complicates the historical component of the work. Given that Fred is learning about Girtin, some of his information is incomplete, which leads to each character’s interpreting Girtin through their own experiences and concerns. Thus, Arturo, who has a background in political rebellion that ended tragically, sees Girtin as a revolutionary artist whose landscapes reflect Girtin’s willingness to move beyond his patrons and create art for himself. As Fred, Sarah, and Arturo look at “The White House at Chelsea,” Arturo thinks, “With this work Girtin says ‘Fuck off’ to his patrons. ‘From now on I’m not going to paint your gentrified picturesque view of your England. I’m going to paint my England.’” Arturo uses the encounters with Girtin’s work and his image of Girtin as a revolutionary almost to confirm his beliefs.

Similarly, Sarah is experiencing a crisis of faith, as she has received an invitation to a gallery retrospective of work by her best friend from college, Jenny. However, Sarah hasn’t spoken to Jenny since college, as Sarah didn’t have the same belief in art that Jenny did, so she disappeared from Jenny’s life without telling her why. She doesn’t want to attend the exhibition’s opening, as she would need to be honest with Jenny about her actions. After she gave up her faith in art, Sarah renewed her faith in God, which is now wavering; thus, she uses Girtin’s work to connect to a spirituality that she has felt is lacking in her life. When Sarah is looking at an online image of “Storiths Heights,” then, she sees it through a religious lens: “Curiously misty…a dense stillness…nothing moves…a sense that something has already occurred…yes…that’s it…the place where everything first began…the beginning of everything—of us! A biblical landscape.” Nothing that Fred has told Sarah or Arturo implies that Girtin has any kind of religious inclination, but Sarah sees what she needs.

Fred is also having a challenging time in his life, as he has been fired from his job in the Revenue and Customs department after he found irregularities in a major company’s behavior. He’s discovered that they’ve been moving profits into tax havens and investing in dishonest deals to avoid paying taxes. One of his co-workers tries to connect Fred to a journalist, so he can expose what he has discovered, but Fred is unsure if he should do so, and he begins to feel like somebody is following him. Unlike the other two, he doesn’t directly connect his situation to Girtin’s work, but he travels to Beddgelert, where Girtin seems to have had an epiphany about his art. In fact, one theory about Girtin’s death, according to Fred, is that he was so devoted to his art, he was out in the damp and cold, which made his tuberculosis worse, leading to his death. He literally died for his art. When Fred returns from Beddgelert, he has decided what he should do as well.

One of the questions Zárate is asking through these three characters, then, is about how we see art and, thus, the world. Throughout the work, they interpret situations differently, whether that’s how they see the models they’re sketching to Girtin’s work to the stories they hear. Zárate isn’t arguing that there’s some stable interpretation of art or experience — a difficult argument to make in 2024 — but he does want to show that each of the characters takes what they need from Girtin’s work and life. Each character uses the art and biography as inspiration as they work through their struggles and try to make important decisions. Similarly, even though they each view situations differently, they are each able to see attributes in each other’s lives and offer insight that the person in that difficulty can't. Thus, Arturo (an atheist) is able to help Sarah not only with her feelings about Jenny’s exhibition opening, but also with her faith. Sarah is able to help Arturo deal with the emotional fallout from his past political actions, and both Sarah and Arturo help Fred think about how he can move forward after losing his job. Thus, while they all interpret Girtin’s work and the world differently, they can help create better futures for each other through their small community. Though none of their futures are finalized by the end of the work, they are all heading in directions the others helped them find.

They serve as a type of contrast to the friendship between Turner and Girtin, which was more competitive, given the artistic realities of their world. When they were younger, Turner and Girtin would sketch together, each impressed with the other’s work, even though they took different approaches. However, the artistic community of their time created a rivalry between the two, even when Turner and Girtin didn’t take part in that competition. In roughly the middle of the work, in fact, Zárate has a full-page spread of an imaginary scene in the Royal Academy, with a Turner painting on one side and a Girtin work on the other. The members of the academy debate the merits of each, wondering who will be the most successful and, more importantly, whether the friendship between the two can last, a question mirrored in Sarah and Jenny’s friendship, which hasn’t.

Zárate uses his artistic talent to seamlessly weave Girtin’s world into that of Fred, Arturo, and Sarah. While he colors their world with traditional hues, he does so in what appears to be watercolors, the medium Girtin worked in. Thus, even while they are in the contemporary world, Girtin seems linger throughout it. When Zárate transitions to Girtin’s era, the color scheme switches to predominantly pale yellows, though often with some dark backgrounds, especially when portraying London at the time. The transitions to Girtin’s life meld with modernity, as an image from one will lead into another. For example, Zárate might have a scene of the three main characters walking along the street talking about Girtin, which leads to a panel of three people walking down the street in Girtin’s London, as the reader begins to see the story Fred is telling. Girtin’s work also anchors three key moments in the book, as Zárate has three fold-out pages, giving the reader and the characters a larger view of Girtin’s watercolors. Arturo looks at one by himself, then Sarah does, but then all three characters view one together. In each scene, the characters are moving toward understanding choices they have to make, choices that will help define each of them.

It’s not only Girtin’s life, though, where Zárate changes his artistic style. When he reveals parts of Arturo and Sarah’s pasts, the palette becomes darker, whether that’s black and white for Arturo (with flames behind him to reveal how he feels about his actions) or a dark-ish blue for Sarah. Also, in a more humorous vein, in the midst of revealing part of Girtin’s life, the style switches within that scene to match Thomas Rowlandson’s caricatures, as Girtin walks past Rowlandson and hears people talk about his work, which they describe as “cartoons to make [them] laugh and think.” Zárate’s artistic approach enables him to move between time and space without traditional panel breaks or unnecessary exposition, allowing the reader to feel themselves moving between different worlds.

To add one more layer to the complicated view of perception, Zárate ends with an afterword by Dr. Greg Smith, a Senior Research Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. He reveals that scholars know much more about Girtin than Fred and that not everything Fred reveals is true. As both Sarah and Arturo have done throughout the work, Fred has shaped Girtin to match the view of him he needs to have, somebody who was willing to die for their art. Most readers won’t know what, exactly, is true about Girtin’s life, which is Zárate’s point. We all interpret whatever we read. Even if we read a straight biography about Girtin, it would be an interpretation that readers would then interpret. However, just because something is fictional or an interpretation doesn’t mean it can’t inspire others or raise important questions about purpose and meaning. Zárate’s work does exactly that, while pointing readers toward an artist they might never have heard of otherwise.

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