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In the summer of 1800 Thomas Girtin painted his one famous watercolour and then, two years later, without having fulfilled its promise, aged 27, died.

This celebrated work is called The White House at Chelsea, though it is, in fact, a view of Battersea; the sun has dipped to the right, and to the left the sense of evening is crepuscular, but strategically placed off-centre between these two half-lights is the flank wall of a cottage, gleaming white. It is an effect still common enough on the Thames as it runs through London - as dusk approaches, the last horizontal rays of the sun catch a building that only at that hour, on that day, is in the right position to reflect them and is made startling in the brilliance, a brilliance doubled by reflection in the water.

Had Girtin lowered the pitch of the white house to give tonal unity to his panoramic reach of landscape, the long blue horizon would have been unremarkable, but he left the paper white and the effect is as galvanising to the eye as any peasant with a red bonnet set by Corot in his glaucous forests. Truth to tell, the cottage wall is not entirely white - Girtin has toned it here and there with touches of muted yellow - for had he not done so, the contrast might well have been destructive, "the eternal grin of a fool", as one contemporary critic put it, unable to see the watercolour's startling beauty.

The White House is one of those works of art to which, when the passionate get the bit between their teeth, too much significance is attributed. It has been pronounced a major work of the Romantic era and a precursor of abstraction; on this slight foundation Girtin is proclaimed a genius, his early death (possibly from asthma) a tragedy to equal the untimely deaths of Keats and Shelley, a loss to the history of art as great as the scarcely older Masaccio and Giorgione. If only he had lived, we muse, what wonders there might have been, better than Turner and Constable perhaps, his immediate contemporaries.

Turner was a close friend, a mourner at his funeral; as little more than boys they had collaborated, sometimes even working together on the same sheet of paper, to produce drawings for Thomas Monro, a doctor to several artists in the late 18th century, who supported, both financially and medically, the great watercolourist John Robert Cozens for the three years of his insanity before his death in 1797. During those three years he employed Girtin and Turner, the first to draw outlines, the second to add watercolour. "They were chiefly employed in copying the outlines or unfinished drawings of Cozens, etc, etc, of which copies they made finished drawings," reported an eyewitness of the day.

This may seem a plodding start for a genius, but it can have done young Girtin no harm to study Cozens, an undoubted genius, at such close quarters. The son of a brushmaker, young Tom was apprenticed at 14 to Edward Dayes, a more than competent master of the draw-it-first-and-paint-it-afterwards school of watercolour, his subjects largely topographical.

Dayes helped to make a draughtsman of the boy, gave him a scrupulous eye for detail and a grasp of conventional composition and perspective - the tools of his trade - but copying Cozens must have broadened his imagination and sown in his mind the notion that watercolour could be more than tinted washes imprisoned within outlines.

The apprenticeship with Dayes did not last its appointed seven years - the older man was "neither amiable nor happy" and Girtin may have been impatient, but there has been, alas, no discoverable truth in the tale that Dayes had him consigned to Bridewell Prison for disobedience, and that there the boy was discovered by the Earl of Essex in a cell papered with wonderful watercolours and carried away to enjoy the grandeurs of a noble life (shades of Ganymede, perhaps). The dull truth is that an antiquarian known to Dayes, James Moore, a little more than feeble draughtsman, offered Girtin employment to improve the wretched antiquarian and topographical studies that he wished to have engraved and published. This led to close collaboration, again sometimes on the same sheet, and Girtin travelled widely with Moore, to the Midlands, Lincoln, Sussex, the North of England and the Scottish borders, before branching out on travels of his own.

In 1794, aged only 19, his association with Moore at its mid-point, Girtin exhibited at the Royal Academy for the first time. What did the Academicians recognise in his work? To us, in the watercolours of 1793-94 there is evidence of basic skill but very little more; diligent in detail, utterly conventional in composition and intriguing only in light and contrast, these watercolours now seem quite unexceptional.

Tate Britain is celebrating the bicentenary of Girtin's death with an exhibition of some 200 watercolours, of which the 160 by Girtin are sandwiched between those from which his grew and those that grew from his - the ascendancy and the decline. Among the precursors are an exceptionally vivacious study by Dayes of elegant figures in front of Buckingham House in 1790, bearing not the slightest connection with Girtin (that is made by views of Ely and Oxford), and by a big, heavy gouache of a lofty beech tree by Paul Sandby, the tag end of the Claudian and Poussinesque traditions of landscape, but magnificent and desirable. Among the followers, only John Sell Cotman is outstanding; five years Girtin's junior and, in the view of some of us, far his superior, far more consistent in high quality - in his context, even the much admired Peter de Wint indicates a serious falling-off.

With the exhibition's earliest Girtins we begin a long, slow and not exactly stimulating plod of nine years and three dozen dreary watercolours before we reach one that even hints at inspiration - the barren ruins of Bamburgh Castle in Northumberland, in which we sense Romantic Sturm und Drang. But there is then an immediate relapse into the cosy business of topography again, into copying Marco Ricci's late 17th century classical conceits, even into reinventing as English watercolours the dramatic Roman engravings of Piranesi.

Not until we are halfway through the exhibition and into 1797 or then-abouts does anything of an independent artist's eye become apparent in Girtin's daring to see an extensive empty landscape as a 17th century Dutchman might have seen it - as a series of horizontal parallels reaching a far distance under an empty sky - but this too is succeeded by another relapse into topography.

We reach 1800 with scarcely a hint of genius - diligence a-plenty, but very little else; and then, in his last two years, there is a flowering of sorts, a more pictorial sense, an emergence into a broader sweep untrammelled by the needs of pernickety topography, even the sense that he might just possibly have been influenced by Rembrandt's eye for landscape. Topography did not altogether disappear from his work, but the six months that he spent in Paris between November 1801 and May 1802 lifted his urban records to an unprecedented aesthetic level. Another six months on and death cut short the promise of his genius.

That genius was never more than a flicker. Paris released his diligent observation from the finicky into

something that fits more comfortably into the less cosy European tradition of the urban landscape, and The White House, as we know, is as good as anything by Corot, Mondrian or Kandinsky (I write with a mocking smile), but there is little else to praise.

Even the exhibition's organisers seem to realise this, interrupting the tedium with demonstrations of technique, of studio practice from first draught to final version (drying out the impulse), and the various papers that Girtin used. An intrusive and distracting backdrop in one room suggests the ghost of his studio, and in another is the brutally over-lit reconstruction of his London Panorama, the Eidometropolis, in modern dress - a really nasty room that utterly defeats its purpose. The Eidometropolis was his major work, 1,944 square feet of canvas painted to give a 360-degree view of London, seen in London in August 1802, and later in Paris, Amsterdam and Lyon, then destroyed by fire. Girtin is unlikely to have painted it himself and the surviving preparatory drawings suggest that those who worked on the vast canvas had to clarify them and add details without reference to Girtin, who was then in Paris; the great stylistic leap that occurred in Paris had no influence on these London drawings, which are tied securely to his earlier work.

This is an exhibition for those patriots who still believe that watercolour is a peculiarly and particularly English art, for whom Girtin is a god, for whom watercolours virtually destroyed by exposure to strong light are still ineffably beautiful in spite of being brown when they should be blue and green, and for whom, preposterously, watercolour is a medium infinitely superior to oil - what sane man, they ask, would want to be Claude if he could instead be Cozens, Poussin if he could be Prout? Would it be unkind of me to observe that when I saw the exhibition, all the other visitors were of a certain age and probably knew every line of Land of Hope and Glory?