stated, he
was the pioneer in exalting water-colour painting to a fine art. His
footsteps were quickly followed by Girtin and Turner. The history of
these two artists, how during their early struggles they were befriended
by that art patron, Dr. Thomas Monro, a capable water-colour painter
himself, and well qualified to give advice, is too well known to need
repetition.

Girtin, during his short career, had no selfish ideas of keeping his
knowledge of painting to himself. It was mainly due to his initiation
that a club was started amongst a small body of young artists for the
study of landscape painting. They met at each other's houses in
rotation. One of its prominent members was Sir Robert Ker Porter,
a painter, traveller and author, who afterwards married a Russian
princess. He was living, at the time, at 16, Great Newport Street, which
had formerly been a residence of Sir Joshua Reynolds, and subsequently
that of Dr. Samuel Johnson. It was in this house that the first meeting
of the club was held "for the purpose of establishing by practice a
School of Historic Landscape, the subjects being designs from poetick
passages." Writing in _The Somerset House Gazette_, in 1823, W. H. Pyne,
under the pseudonym of Ephraim Hardcastle, states "this artist (Girtin)
prepared his drawings on the same principle which had hitherto been
confined to painting in oil, namely, with local colour, and shadowing
the same with the individual tint of its own shadow. Previous to the
practice of Turner and Girtin, drawings were shadowed first entirely
throughout, whatever their component parts--houses, castles, trees,
mountains, fore-grounds, middle-grounds, and distances, all with black
or grey, and these objects were afterwards stained or tinted, enriched
and finished, as is now the custom to colour prints. It was this new
practice, introduced by these distinguished artists, that acquired for
designs in water colour upon paper the title of paintings: a designation
which many works of the existing school decidedly merit, as we lately
beheld in the Exhibition of the Painters in Water Colours, where
pictures of this class were displayed in gorgeous frames, bearing out in
effect against the mass of glittering gold as powerfully as pictures in
oil." Girtin had a partiality for painting in a low tone of colour and
frequently on rough cartridge paper, which assisted in giving a
largeness of manner to his work. The _Landscape_ (Plate XI) is, howeve