Durham Cathedral and Castle, from the River Wear

Durham Cathedral and Castle, from the River Wear is a watercolour over graphite, heightened with gum arabic, by the English watercolourist Thomas Girtin (1775–1802), dated 1796–97 in the online catalogue of his work; it belongs to the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. The sheet measures 37.5 × 49.5 cm and is based on a large pencil sketch, now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, that Girtin drew on his first independent tour, through the northern counties of England and the Scottish Borders in 1796.

Girtin chose a low position beside the weir next to Framwellgate Bridge. From there the double arch of the bridge becomes a solid base above which the castle and cathedral rise on their rock over the Wear, an arrangement the catalogue traces to the example of his master Edward Dayes. Sunlight strikes the two great medieval buildings while the humbler houses, the building on the right and the foreground water sink into shadow; a horse and cart and small figures cross the bridge. When J. M. W. Turner visited Durham in 1797 he drew the scene from the same spot.

A second, larger watercolour of the composition, signed and dated 1799, is in the Whitworth, Manchester (41.6 × 53.7 cm). It leaves out the right-hand building and adds two men repairing the weir. Opinions differ about the order: the Sotheby's catalogue of 2010 thought the Manchester sheet came first, while the Girtin catalogue argues that the Getty sheet is the earlier one, perhaps commissioned by a patron with antiquarian interests, since it barely departs from the on-the-spot sketch. The Getty itself dates it about 1800. At the time the cathedral was at the centre of a dispute over James Wyatt's restoration plans.

The first known owner was Edward Hawke Locker, who lent it to the Society of Painters in Water Colours' loan exhibition of 1823. It later passed through the collections of Henry Vaughan and John Lewis Roget, was shown at Tate Britain's Girtin exhibition in 2002, and was sold at Sotheby's on 14 July 2010 for £265,250 to the Getty.