Three people meet at a life-drawing class somewhere in London, each hoping to find solace and calm behind their easels, and they become unlikely friends. Arturo, a longstanding Argentinian exile, is still coming to terms with the terrible things he saw during the days of the junta. Sarah, an architect and soon-to-be-grandmother, is struggling with her Christian faith and the consequences of a broken friendship. Fred, who works for HM Revenue and Customs, fears he may be about to lose his job, the victim of a cover-up over a company tax evasion. But in Oscar Zarate’s hefty and involving new graphic novel, it isn’t their worries that bond this trio so much as their newfound enthusiasm for the 18th-century watercolourist Thomas Girtin. Over dinner at one another’s houses, they’re soon talking of little else.
Such passion may be traced back originally to Fred, for it was he who first found himself spellbound by Girtin’s uncommon talent, beguiled by how relatively little is known about the artist, and frustrated that so much of his work is hidden from public view; his enthusiasm was catching. Girtin, a friend and rival of J M W Turner, died in 1802 at the aged of just 27, and there are those who believe that had he grown old, he would have become the greater artist of the two, a conviction Turner may have shared. “Had poor Tom lived, I would have starved,” Turner is supposed to have said after Girtin’s untimely death (the result, probably, of an asthma attack). Turner is known particularly to have admired Girtin’s exquisite and widely celebrated The White House at Chelsea (1800), a picture now in the collection of Tate Britain, where it can be seen only by appointment.
Zarate’s graphic novel has two time frames. In the first, we follow the three friends as they attend to the various shadows in their lives, and pursue their new interest in Girtin; here are London pubs, London bus queues, and many late nights spent in the blue glow of a laptop. In the second, we travel back in time to revolutionary Europe, when the young Girtin, his hair cut as outrageously short as Danton’s, was leading his own insurgence, hellbent on finding an artistic language that would capture nature as it really was. Zarate’s drawings in both realms are intensely atmospheric, but it’s in the candlelight and sepia shades of the 18th century that he’s at his best, not least because he knows his limitations. Rather than trying and failing to play the copyist, he has chosen simply to reproduce several of Girtin’s greatest paintings, sometimes on double pages that fold outwards, almost as if this were a sketch book.
The result is deeply satisfying and, at moments, spectacular. If this is a story about the power of art and the role it can play in enriching everyday lives, it’s also a pretty nimble biography – and if it leaves you wanting to know more, you’ll find your starting point here, too. The novel comes with an enlightening afterword by Dr Greg Smith, a senior research fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and the man responsible for the catalogue raisonné of Girtin’s work that was finally published online last year.
Thomas Girtin: The Forgotten Painter by Oscar Zarate is published by SelfMadeHero (£34.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
