The “Connoisseur’s Panorama”: Thomas Girtin’s Eidometroplis (1801–1803) and a New Visual Language for the Modern City

The London panorama produced by Thomas Girtin in 1801 has long since been lost, but thanks to the surviving preparatory drawings and a wealth of documentary material, we can piece together the project's progress in unprecedented detail.Newly discovered archival material, in particular, shows it as a highly capitalized commercial project: a collaboration in which Girtin ceded many of the artist's responsibilities to a business partner and a team of assistants.Girtin's working drawings also help to explain how the Eidometropolis, as the panorama was titled, broke new ground in the depiction of the city.Allying fine art landscape effects with the scrupulous topographical veracity required of the panoramist, Girtin succeeded in creating a new way of reflecting the heterogeneous complexity of the modern city in flux.Concentrating on the issue of legibility, the second part of the article consequently examines the way in which the panoramic mode generates a fragmented and occluded image of the city, which Girtin matched with a visual strategy which emphasizes the random and the quotidian.

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