The Eruption of Mount Vesuvius

Despite his untimely death at age twenty-seven, Girtin revolutionized British drawing. He embraced a more painterly style of watercolor drawing, deploying bold washes and somber coloring with dramatic compositional effects. The monochrome palette of this drawing was typical of a group of British draftsmen to which Girtin belonged in the 1790s that sought to elevate their work to the status of the epic, forming a sketching society to promote their cause. Their subjects were usually taken from a literary source or from the imagination--as was this drawing, since Girtin never traveled to Italy. -- Exhibition Label, from "Drawn to Greatness: Master Drawings from the Thaw Collection"
According to the minute book of the Sketching Society, the subject chosen by Robert Ker Porter (1777-1842) for 2 November 1999 was "Mount Vesuv." Although the precise poetic source is not identified, it has been suggested that it could have been James Thomson's Liberty ("By black Vesuvius thundering o'er the coast / His midnight earthquakes, and his mining fires")