An Extensive Building with Farm Buildings and Church Ruin

This small landscape demonstrates Girtin's love for his native landscape and ability to describe textures that range from decayed wood to ruined masonry–elements associated in the late eighteenth-century with the new aesthetic of the Picturesque. From his late teens, the artist toured England to sketch, often in the company of his friend and contemporary J. M. W. Turner, helping to establish watercolor painting as a practice central to Britain art. Here, Girtin uses a small sheet to represent farm buildings near a Romanesque ruin in the foreground and fills the background with a vista that includes hills and a town near a river or estuary.