Along with Turner (q.v.), Thomas Girtin was the true founder of watercolour painting, as opposed to tinting. Turner went so far as to say that if Tom Girtin had lived, he, Turner would have starved. Girtin was greatly stimulated by his visits to the North, which began in 1796.The Royal Academy exhibition of 1797 showed ten Girtin drawings, including one of Jedburgh Abbey and two of St Cuthbert on Holy Island. Other Girtin pictures, of a breadth and power never seen in watercolour before, include light and shade over rolling moorland. A picture of Bamburgh castle is especially fine. From a pencil sketch made in 1796, Girtin completed the work entitled Durham Cathedral and Bridge from the River Wear in 1799, the year in which he began to be spoken of as a genius. The minute detail of this painting, which is now in the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, demonstrates that Girtin had become a master of the topographical watercolour. A fine watercolour of Morpeth Bridge in the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle dates to the year of his death, 1802.
In his later years, Girtin's work is marked by an increasing sense of isolation and solitude. In Tynemouth, Northumberland, he chose a beach scene, a subject which did not become popular until later in the nineteenth century. Martin Hardie states that the picture is 'so impressive in its rendering of the stark headland, the lonely stretch of sands, the dark and swollen clouds pregnant with rain.' Girtin disliked fashionable society and 'when travelling to the North, he would take passage in a collier; and his delight was to live... with the crew, eating salt beef, smoking and exchanging jokes.'