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.
