THE DEVELOPMENT
OF BRITISH LANDSCAPE
PAINTING
IN WATER-COLOURS
EDITED BY CHARLES
HOLME. TEXT BY
ALEXANDER J.
FINBERG & E. A.
TAYLOR
MCMXVIII “THE STUDIO” LTD.
LONDON PARIS NEW YORK
CONTENTS
ARTICLES
PAGE
THE DEVELOPMENT OF BRITISH LANDSCAPE PAINTING IN WATER-COLOURS.
BY ALEXANDER J. FINBERG 1
(1) Introductory Remarks on the Idea of Development as
Applied to Art 1
(2) The Bearing of these Remarks on the History of British
Water-Colour Painting 3
(3) The Development of Subject-Matter and Technique 4
(4) Some Famous Water-Colour Painters of the Past 8
Paul Sandby 9
Alexander Cozens 10
John Robert Cozens 11
Thomas Girtin 13
Joseph Mallord William Turner 15
John Sell Cotman 17
David Cox 19
Samuel Prout 20
Peter de Wint 21
Richard Parkes Bonington 21
Myles Birket Foster 22
Alfred William Hunt 23
James Abbott McNeill Whistler 24
(5) The Work of To-day 26
THE DEVELOPMENT OF BRITISH LANDSCAPE PAINTING IN WATER-COLOURS:
SCOTTISH PAINTERS. BY E. A. TAYLOR 29
ILLUSTRATIONS
_AFTER ENGLISH PAINTERS_
_PLATE_
Birch, S. J. Lamorna, R.W.S. “Environs of Camborne” V
Cotman, John Sell, R.W.S. “Kirkham Abbey” III
Cozens, J. R. “Lake Albano and Castel Gandolfo” I
Fisher, Mark, A.R.A. “Landscape” VI
Gere, Charles M. “The Round House” VII
Girtin, Thomas. “The Valley of the Aire” II
Goodwin, Albert, R.W.S. “Lincoln” VIII
Holmes, C. J. “Near Aisgill” IX
Little, Robert, R.W.S., R.S.W. “Tidal Basin, Montrose” X
Rich, Alfred W. “Swaledale” XI
Smythe, Lionel, R.A., R.W.S. “Caught in the Frozen
Palms of Spring” XII
Turner, J. M. W., R.A. “Launceston” IV
Walker, W. Eyre, R.W.S. “A Pool in the Woods” XIII
Waterlow, Sir E. A., R.A., R.W.S., H.R.S.W. “In
Crowhurst Park, Sussex” XIV
_AFTER SCOTTISH PAINTERS_
Allan, Robert W. Allan, R.W.S., R.S.W. “The Maple
in Autumn” XV
Brown, A. K., R.S.A., R.S.W. “Ben More” XVI
Cadenhead, James, A.R.S.A., R.S.W. “A Moorland” XVII
Cameron, D. Y., A.R.A., R.S.A., R.W.S., R.S.W.
“Autumn in Strath Tay” XVIII
Flint, W. Russell, R.W.S., R.S.W. “Autumn Evening,
Rydal Water” XIX
Houston, George, A.R.S.A., R.S.W. “Iona” XX
Paterson, James, R.S.A., R.W.S., R.S.W. “Frenchland
to Queensberry, Moffat Dale” XXI
Smith, D. Murray, A.R.W.S. “On the Way to the
South Downs” XXII
Taylor, E. A. “A Bit of High Corrie” XXIII
Walton, E. A., R.S.A., P.R.S.W. “Suffolk Pastures” XXIV
PREFATORY NOTE
_The Editor desires to acknowledge his indebtedness to the artists
and owners who have kindly lent their drawings for reproduction in
this volume_
THE DEVELOPMENT OF BRITISH LANDSCAPE PAINTING IN WATER-COLOURS. BY
ALEXANDER J. FINBERG
(1) INTRODUCTORY REMARKS ON THE IDEA OF DEVELOPMENT AS APPLIED TO ART
The idea of development has played, for considerably more than half a
century, and still plays, a large part in all discussions about art. And
it is obvious that it is a very useful and at the same time a very
dangerous idea; useful, because with its aid you can prove anything you
have a mind to, and dangerous, because it conceals all sorts of latent
suggestions, vague presuppositions, and lurking misconceptions, and thus
misleads and beguiles the unwary. The most insidious and dangerous of
these suggestions is its connexion with the ideas of progress or
advance. The dictionaries, indeed, give “progress” as one of the
synonyms of “development,” and amongst the synonyms of “progress” I find
“advance,” “attainment,” “growth,” “improvement,” and “proficiency.” So
that as soon as we begin to connect the idea of development with the
history of art we find ourselves committed, before we quite realize what
we are doing, to the view that the latest productions of art are
necessarily the best. If art develops, it necessarily grows, improves,
and advances, and the history of art becomes a record of the steps by
which primitive work has passed into the fully developed art of the
present; the latest productions being evidently the most valuable,
because they sum up in their triumphant complexity all the tentative
variations and advances of which time and experience have approved.
Stated thus baldly the idea as applied to art seems perhaps too
obviously at variance with our tastes, experience, and instinctive
standards of artistic values to be worth a moment’s consideration. Yet
we are all too well aware that this is the line of argument by which
every freak, every eccentric, insane or immoral manifestation of
artistic perversity and incompetence which has appeared in Europe within
the last thirty or forty years has been commended and justified.
Certainly in England every writer on art who calls himself “advanced” is
an evolutionist of this crude and uncritical type. At one time it was
Cézanne and Van Gogh who were supposed to have summed up in their
triumphant complexity the less developed efforts of Titian, Rembrandt,
Watteau, and Turner, and at the present moment Cézanne and Van Gogh are
being superseded by Mr. Roger Fry and his young lions of “The New
Movement.”
The worst of it is that the idea of development, of evolution, is a
perfectly sound and useful one in certain spheres of activity. In
science, for instance, the idea works and is helpful. The successive
modifications and improvements by which the latest type of steam-engine
has been evolved from Stevenson’s “Puffing Billy,” or the latest type of
air-ship from the Montgolfier balloon, form a series of steps which are
related and connected with each other, and they are so intimately
connected that the latest step sums up and supersedes all the others. No
one would travel with Stevenson’s engine who could employ a British or
American engine of the latest type. There we have a definite system of
development--of growth, improvement, and increased proficiency. And we
find the same thing if we look at science as a whole, as a body of
knowledge of a special kind. Its problems are tied together,
subordinated and co-ordinated, unified in one vast system, so that we
can represent its history as a single line of progress or retreat.
But art is not like science. Donatello’s sculpture is not a growth from
the sculpture of Pheidias or Praxiteles in the same way that the London
and North-Western engine is a growth from Stevenson’s model; nor was
Raphael’s work developed from Giotto’s in the same way. Works of art are
separate and independent things. That is why Donatello has not
superseded Pheidias, nor Raphael Giotto; and that is why the world
cherishes the earliest works of art quite as much as the later ones.
Yet we are bound to admit that we can find traces of an evolutionary
process even in the history of art, if we look diligently for them. I
remember to have seen a book by a well-known Italian critic in which the
representations of the Madonna are exhibited from this point of view (A.
Venturi, “La Madonna,” Milan, 1899). In it the pictures of the Madonna
are treated as an organism which gradually develops, attains perfection,
gets old, and dies. There is something to be said for this point of
view. When you have a number of artists successively treating the same
subject you naturally find that alterations and fresh ideas are imported
into their work. These additions and modifications can quite fairly be
regarded as developments of the subject-matter and its treatment. But
such developments are always partial and one-sided, and they are
accompanied with losses of another kind. If Raphael’s Madonnas are more
correctly drawn and modelled than those of Giotto, these gains are
balanced by a corresponding loss in the spiritual qualities of sincerity
and earnestness of religious conviction. It depends, therefore, on what
narrow and strictly defined point of view we adopt whether we find
development or decay in any particular series of artistic productions.
From one point of view the history of art from Giotto to Raphael can be
regarded as a process of growth and advance, from another, the same
series can be taken, as Ruskin actually took it, as an exhibition of the
processes of death and decay. The enlightened lover and student of art
will look at the matter from both, and other, points of view, but he
will realize that the theory of development does not help him in any way
to find a standard of value for works of art.
Art must be judged by its own standards, and those standards tell us
[Illustration: PLATE I.
(_In the possession of C. Morland Agnew, Esq._)
“LAKE ALBANO AND CASTEL GANDOLFO.” BY J. R. COZENS.]
that each individual masterpiece is perfect in its own marvellous way,
whether it was produced like the _Cheik el Beled_ or _The Scribe_, some
five or six thousand years ago, or like the paintings of Reynolds,
Gainsborough, and Turner within comparatively recent times.
(2) THE BEARING OF THESE REMARKS ON THE HISTORY OF BRITISH WATER-COLOUR
PAINTING
The direct bearing of these remarks on our immediate subject-matter
will, I hope, be evident to all who are familiar with the literature of
the history of British water-colour painting.
The first attempt to form an historical series of British water-colours
for the public use was begun in 1857, by Samuel Redgrave for the Science
and Art Department of what was then the Board of Education. Thanks to
Redgrave’s knowledge and enthusiasm a worthy collection of examples of
the works of the founders of the school was soon got together, and this
nucleus was rapidly enlarged by purchases, gifts, and bequests. These
drawings were housed and exhibited in what was then called the South
Kensington Museum, and in 1877 Redgrave published an admirable
“Descriptive Catalogue” of the collection. As an introduction to this
catalogue he wrote a valuable account of the origin and historical
development of the art. Both the official character of this publication
as well as its intrinsic merits, literary and historical--for Redgrave
and his brother Richard, who had assisted him in the work, were two of
the best informed historians of English art in the last
century--combined to make it at the time and for many years afterwards
the standard and most authoritative book on this subject. But its
historical part has one serious defect, due perhaps to some extent to
the unfortunate association of science with art in the same museum.
Redgrave’s conception of artistic development was evidently borrowed
ready-made from the ideas of his scientific colleagues. He treats the
chronological arrangement of the drawings in exactly the same way as the
men of science treat the successive alterations and improvements which
Stevenson’s first model steam-engine underwent; and as he found the
earlier drawings approached very nearly to monochrome, while the later
ones were highly coloured and fuller in the statement and realization of
detail, he took it for granted that these changes marked the true line
of progress and development in the art. The early “stained” drawings of
Scott and Rooker were treated as the primitive and undeveloped models
from which the later and more elaborate works of Turner, Copley
Fielding, Sidney Cooper, John F. Lewis, Louis Haghe, and Carl Werner
were developed. Every fresh complication of technique and elaboration of
effect were hailed enthusiastically as signs of “progress,” and
brilliance of colour, richness of effect, and fullness of realization
were treated as the marks of “the full perfection” of which the art was
capable. In this way water-colour “drawing” became “elevated” into the
“perfected” art of _painting_ in water-colours, and the beneficent
cosmic process triumphantly produced paintings in water-colour which
could actually “hold their own” in force and brilliancy of effect with
oil paintings.
As a temporary measure Redgrave’s excursus into evolutionary theory must
have been extraordinarily successful. No more specious doctrine could
well have been invented to flatter and gratify all parties concerned at
the moment; the presidents and leading members of the two water-colour
societies must have found peace and comfort in Redgrave’s theory, and
the general public must have felt that “enlightenment and progress” even
in artistic matters were being duly fostered by an efficient “Committee
Council on Education.” But the theory has serious defects. It sets up a
false standard of artistic value, it withdraws attention from the higher
beauties of art to focus it upon merely materialistic and technical
questions, and, what is perhaps still more serious, it prejudges the
efforts of subsequent artists, and closes the door to future changes and
developments.
The importance of these latter considerations will be seen as soon as we
turn our attention to the art of the present day and that of the period
which has intervened between it and the date of the publication of
Redgrave’s catalogue. Consider for one moment the water-colours of
Whistler, Clausen, Wilson Steer, D. Y. Cameron, Anning Bell, Charles
Sims, A. W. Rich, Charles Gere, and Romilly Fedden, and judge them in
terms of Redgrave’s formula! If we do we are bound to confess that they
one and all stand condemned. If Redgrave’s idea of the line of progress
and advance is correct we are bound to believe that the works of these
fine artists represent, not progress and advance, but decay and loss.
Indeed, the two chief movements in art in the last quarter of the last
century, the discovery of atmosphere as the predominant factor in
pictorial representation--what may be called for the sake of brevity the
whole Impressionistic movement, and the later deliberate search for
simplicity of statement, either in the interests of decorative effect or
emotional expression, were seriously thwarted and hindered by the
demands for “exhibition finish,” so-called conscientious workmanship,
and a standard of professional technique--“real painting, as such,” as
Ruskin called it--set up and maintained by the erroneous theories of
artistic progress of which Redgrave was only one of the exponents.
It is therefore of the utmost importance that any attempt to deal fairly
and generously with the art of more recent times shall consciously and
deliberately dissociate itself from such theories.
(3) THE DEVELOPMENT OF SUBJECT-MATTER AND TECHNIQUE
After what has been written above it is to be hoped that the dangers
attending the use of the word “development” have been exorcised. We
intend to use the word merely as a synonym for chronological sequence,
and we have been careful to point out that the historical order in which
artists appear does not coincide or run parallel with any growth,
advance, progress, or improvement in the artistic value of their work.
Shorn thus of its stolen finery of theoretical prejudice and
philosophical imposture the naked course of chronological sequence
presents few attractions to the enthusiastic lover of the beautiful. It
has, however, its uses. These are mainly mnemonical, for it supplies the
thread on which we string together in our memory the things strewn along
the schedule of the years without apparent rhyme or reason. The dates
will not help us to pick out the good from the bad, but they help us to
place among their proper surroundings the good things which our
sympathies and instincts find for us.
With this grudging apostrophe to the historical maid-of-all-work we will
proceed with our survey of the brief tale of years during which our
national school of water-colour painting has been in existence. The
business of this chapter is to outline the development of form and
content, of subject-matter and technique.
For the beginnings of British landscape painting we must look to the
drawings and engravings connected with the study of topography, using
this word in the ordinary sense of place-drawing, or the description of
a particular building or spot. Generally speaking the designs of the
earlier draughtsmen are now known only through the engravings which were
made from them. Roget, in his “History of the Old Water-Colour Society”
(chapters i and iii, Book I) gives a full and interesting account of
these engravings. The earliest drawings we need refer to are those of
Samuel Scott (1710-1772) and his pupil, William Marlow (1740-1813), Paul
Sandby (1725-1809), William Pars (1742-1782), Michael Angelo Rooker
(1743-1801), and Thomas Hearne (1744-1817).
Working alongside these artists was another group of men who produced
“landscapes” which relied for their interest rather upon the sentiments
evoked by their subject-matter and treatment than upon the purely
topographical character of their work. These painters of poetical or
sentimental landscape may be said to have begun with George Lambert
(1710?-1765), Richard Wilson (1713-1782), and Thomas Gainsborough
(1727-1788). Of these only the latter used water-colour as an
independent medium. His _Landscape with Waggon on a Road through a Wood_
(British Museum) reminds one somewhat of the landscape studies of Rubens
and Van Dyck, at least as regards the colour-effect and the feeling for
atmosphere. Through Gainsborough the influence of Rubens and that of the
Flemish conception of landscape painting was brought to bear on British
art, while Lambert and Richard Wilson familiarized the younger artists
and their patrons with the style and aims of Poussin and Claude. The
same influences are discernible in the works of Alexander Cozens (d.
1786) and his son, John Robert Cozens (1752-1799), both of whom worked
almost entirely in water-colour.
The works of these painters of poetical landscape taught the public to
demand something more emotional in feeling and more dignified and
impressive in treatment than the prosaic transcripts and conventionally
composed drawings of the topographers. Their example also taught the
rising generation of artists, amongst whom we find Edward Dayes
(1763-1804), John Glover (1767-1849), Joshua Cristall (1767?-1847), F.
L. T. Francia (1772-1839), Thomas Girtin (1775-1802), J. M. W. Turner
(1775-1851), John Constable (1776-1837), and John Sell Cotman
(1782-1842), how to meet those demands.
In Turner’s _Warkworth Castle_ (V. and A. Museum), exhibited in 1799,
and Girtin’s _Bridgnorth_ (British Museum), painted in 1802, we find
these two streams of influence uniting. These drawings are at the same
time both topographical and poetical; each represents a particular place
with a good deal of accuracy, but in such a way that the drawing might
just as correctly be called a poetical landscape as a topographical
representation.
This combination of fact with emotion, of representation with poetry,
has remained during the whole of the nineteenth century and down to the
present day the dominant characteristic of British landscape painting.
Sometimes the topographical factor was subdued or almost submerged, as
in the water-colours of George Barret, junr. (1767-1842) and Francis
Oliver Finch (1802-1862), but it is generally predominant, though always
in combination with emotional or poetical expression, in the works of
William Havell (1782-1857), David Cox (1783-1859), Peter De Wint
(1784-1849), Copley Fielding (1787-1855), G. F. Robson (1788-1833),
Samuel Prout (1783-1852), William Hunt (1790-1864), Clarkson Stanfield
(1793-1867), David Roberts (1796-1864), J. D. Harding (1797 or 8-1863),
R. P. Bonington (1802-1828), T. Shotter Boys (1803-1874), J. Scarlett
Davis (1804?-1844), J. F. Lewis (1805-1876), W. J. Muller (1812-1845),
William Callow (1812-1908), Birket Foster (1825-1899), A. W. Hunt
(1830-1896), E. M. Wimperis (1835-1900), Tom Collier (1840-1891), and J.
Buxton Knight (1842-1908).
The course of development of the subject-matter of British landscape
painting in water-colour we may, therefore, say has been somewhat as
follows: it started with the object of recording as clearly and
accurately as was possible the appearance of buildings and places, and
it did this, not for purely artistic reasons, but in the interests of
antiquarian, archæological, historical, or geographical information; by
the side of this place-recording activity there sprang up a series of
painters who aimed at the production of landscapes as the means of
artistic and emotional expression; we then find these two groups acting
on each other, the poetical school teaching the topographers style,
design, “atmosphere,” and emotion, and the topographers directing the
attention of the poetical painters to the observation and study of
nature and the expression of
[Illustration: PLATE II.
(_In the possession of Thomas Girtin, Esq._)
“THE VALLEY OF THE AIRE.” BY THOMAS GIRTIN.]
their own personal emotions; and the outcome of this process is the
present school of British landscape painters in water-colours, which
attempts, both in its highest and in its lowest efforts, to do full
justice to the progressive demands which the educated public has thus
learned to make on the artist.
We turn now to the development of technique. The earliest topographers
worked on white paper, on which, after the subject had been outlined in
pencil--such outlines being sometimes enforced with pen and ink, the
general system of light and shade was washed in monochrome; the local
colours were then washed over this preparation. The method, so far as
the colours were concerned, was somewhat similar to that of tinting or
colouring an engraving. In drawings executed in this manner by Sandby,
Rooker, and Hearne the brilliance of the colours is somewhat subdued by
the grey underpainting. But this is probably due to the fact that the
artists worked only with their washes of transparent colour, relying
upon the white paper asserting itself through these washes. The luminous
effects produced in this way--in drawings like Sandby’s _Windsor: East
View from Crown Corner_ (British Museum) and Rooker’s _St. Botolph’s_
(V. and A. Museum)--have been so much admired that many living artists
have deliberately gone back to this simple way of working.
The effect of the grey underpainting on the finished work is, however,
largely dependent on the artist’s wishes. If he chooses to sacrifice the
luminosity of the white paper he can paint over his preliminary washes
with colour so heavily charged that it will practically annihilate them.
This is what Girtin generally did in his later works, though it must be
added that he also changed the colour of his preparatory washes from
grey to brown. I am inclined to think, therefore, that Redgrave has
exaggerated the importance of the use or disuse of these preliminary
washes.
The earlier poetical painters, like Lambert, and Sandby in his larger
compositions painted for exhibition purposes, worked in body-colour,
i.e., opaque white was mixed with all the colours. In this way some
approximation to the force of oil painting was obtained. Another way of
getting a similar result was to work with the paper wet. A good example
of this method is Turner’s _Warkworth Castle_. In this picture Turner
tries to do in water-colour what Richard Wilson did in oils. He gets his
effects of deep rich tone and force of colour by working with a heavily
charged brush, sponging, and wiping out the lights with a dry brush or
handkerchief or scraping them with a knife.
The methods of _Warkworth Castle_ were practically those used by the
younger Barret, Varley, Copley Fielding, Cox, and De Wint, but after
about 1830 we find opaque white coming into general use, at first merely
to give increased force to the high lights, but later it was mixed
freely with all the transparent colours, and toned or tinted paper was
used to give greater brilliance to the body-colour. John F. Lewis worked
in this way, but the hardness and glitter to which it so easily conduced
led to its abandonment by the later artists who set themselves to render
the delicate gradations of the atmosphere. Yet one must admit that in
the hands of a master technician like Turner all the unpleasant
qualities so often apparent in body-colour work can be avoided, as the
_Rivers of France_ drawings prove. At the present time some artists, who
aim especially at force and brilliance of colour, prefer to work in
tempera, but it is doubtful whether this medium can rightly be regarded
as a form of water-colour painting.
On the whole we may say that the technique of water-colour has changed
very little during the last two centuries. The chief change has perhaps
been connected with the introduction, about 1830, of moist colours put
up in metal tubes, a great convenience to artists in search of bold
effects without the expenditure of much time or trouble. But even this
has proved a doubtful advantage, and many artists have now gone back to
the use of hard cakes of colour, similar to those with which the earlier
men obtained their delicate and luminous results.
(4) SOME FAMOUS WATER-COLOUR PAINTERS OF THE PAST
In the previous section we have deliberately refrained from saying
anything about the purely artistic qualities of the works we have
referred to. This is because we have been engaged in a strictly
historical survey, and to the eye of history there is no difference
between the works of a great artist and those of a bungler. Both are
equally patent and indubitable facts. It is the business of criticism to
appraise the artistic beauty of works of art. And if in our historical
survey we have kept our attention fixed generally on the works of the
greater men, this is more the result of accident than design. Art
criticism has already sifted much of the good from the bad in the work
of the past, and it is more convenient, in a general survey of this
kind, to deal with what is best known and valued. But because history
can thus take advantage of what art criticism has done, that is no
reason why we should confuse the two processes, and it cannot be
repeated too often that historical importance or interest has nothing
whatever to do with artistic value.
The aim of this section is to make good the defects of historical study,
so far, at least, as the limited space at our disposal will permit. With
this object in view we have selected a baker’s dozen of the more famous
artists of the past, and we will endeavour to indicate some of the
qualities which make their works a joy and delight to those who have the
privilege of knowing them. In each case we will supply, in tabloid form,
a certain amount of biographical information, as knowledge of the time
and place in which an artist works and the conditions under which he
produces helps us to understand what he has done; we shall also attempt
to point out the chief public galleries where each artist’s works
[Illustration: PLATE III.
(_In the possession of Messrs. J. Palser & Sons._)
“KIRKHAM ABBEY.” BY JOHN SELL COTMAN, R.W.S.]
can be seen (when happier times bring about the reopening of our museums
and art galleries), and the sources from which those who care for it can
obtain fuller information and more authoritative criticism than we
ourselves can supply. Such information as we can give will be as correct
as we can make it, but it will make no claim whatever to be exhaustive.
PAUL SANDBY
[Born at Nottingham, 1725; entered military drawing office of the Tower
of London, 1746; draughtsman to a survey of the Northern and Western
Highlands, 1748-1751, during which time he published some etchings of
Scottish views; worked at Windsor for some years from 1752, where his
brother, Thomas, was Deputy Ranger; chief drawing-master, Royal Military
Academy, Woolwich, 1768-1797; elected Director of the Society of
Artists, October 18, 1766; original member of Royal Academy, 1768;
introduced the aquatint method of engraving into England; published
first set of twelve aquatints of views in South Wales, 1774, a second
set of views in North Wales, 1776, and a third set in 1777; died 1809.
EXHIBITED: Society of Artists, 1760-’68; Royal Academy, 1769-’77,
’79-’82, ’86-’88, ’90-’95, ’97-1802, ’06-’09; Free Society, 1782,
’83.
WORKS IN PUBLIC GALLERIES: National Gallery; V. and A. Museum
(Water-Colours); British Museum; National Gallery of Ireland;
Greenwich Hospital; Diploma Gallery, R.A.; Manchester Whitworth
Institute; Norwich, Nottingham, Glasgow, etc., Art Galleries.
BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES: “Thomas and Paul Sandby,” by
William Sandby, 1892; “D. N. B.”; Roget’s “History of the Old
Water-Colour Society,” 1891.
REPRODUCTIONS OF WORKS: “The Earlier English Water-Colour
Painters,” by Cosmo Monkhouse; “The English Water-Colour Painters,”
by A. J. Finberg; “Early English Water-Colour,” by C. E. Hughes;
“Water-Colour,” by the Hon. Neville Lytton; “Water-Colour
Painting,” by A. W. Rich; “The Royal Academy” (THE STUDIO Summer
Number, 1904); THE STUDIO, Jan. 1918.]
Sandby was one of the most prolific of the earlier topographical
artists. His numberless drawings and the engravings he made from them
did more than any one man had done before to familiarize Englishmen with
the beauties of their native land. He was an indefatigable traveller,
and he was the first artist to discover the artistic beauties of Wales.
He worked both in transparent colour and in gouache. His drawings in the
latter medium, of which there are several in the V. and A. Museum, are
distinctly inferior to his works in pure colour. They are scenic and
conventional in design, feeble and pretentious in execution. His
drawings in transparent colour, however, are delightfully fresh and
vigorous; luminous in effect, and filled with proofs of keen and genial
observation. They seem full of air and light, vivid human interest, and
in their treatment of architecture and of all natural features they are
at once careful, accurate and lucid without ever showing signs of labour
or fatigue. In the abundance of his work and its variety Sandby
approached nearer to Turner than any other artist. But he had not
Turner’s subtlety of eye and hand, nor his exquisite sense of artistic
form. His landscapes are well composed, but on conventional lines, and
the whole material is never welded together into an original and
impeccable design, as with Turner, Cozens, and Cotman.
Sandby’s Welsh aquatints with their many daring effects of light form
the real forerunners of Turner’s “Liber Studiorum.” They display better
than any single drawing the width and range of the artist’s powers.
As an engraver and water-colour painter Paul Sandby is a genial and
inspiriting personality. He transformed topographical draughtsmanship
into something new and living, instinct with life and emotion. “And if
we may not call him a great artist, we may at least say that he was a
topographical draughtsman of genius.”
ALEXANDER COZENS
[Born in Russia, date unknown; son of Peter the Great and an
Englishwoman; sent by his father to study painting in Italy; said to
have come to England in 1746; drawing-master at Eton School, 1763-1768;
married a sister of Robert Edge Pine; elected Fellow of the Society of
Artists, 1765; died in Duke Street, Piccadilly, April 23, 1786.
EXHIBITED: Society of Artists, 1760, ’63, ’65-’71; Free Society,
1761, ’62; Royal Academy, 1772, ’73, ’75, ’77-’79, ’81.
WORKS IN PUBLIC GALLERIES: V. and A. Museum (Water-Colours);
British Museum; Manchester Whitworth Institute.
BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES: Leslie’s “Handbook for Young
Painters”; Redgrave’s “Dictionary”; “Reminiscences of Henry
Angelo,” vol. i, 212-216; “D. N. B.”
REPRODUCTIONS: THE STUDIO, Feb. 1917; Finberg’s “English
Water-Colour Painters.”]
The date when Alexander Cozens came to England is given above as 1746.
This is what we find in all the reference books, and it is founded on a
memorandum pasted in a book of drawings made by the artist in Italy
which is now in the British Museum. This memorandum states that
“Alexander Cozens, in London, author of these drawings, lost them, and
many more, in Germany, by their dropping from his saddle, when he was
riding on his way from Rome to England, in the year 1746. John Cozens,
his son, being at Florence in the year 1776, purchased them. When he
returned to London in the year 1779 he delivered the drawings to his
father.” Now either the date in this note is wrong or, what seems a more
probable explanation, Alexander Cozens’s journey to England in 1746 was
not the occasion of his first visit to this country, for there is an
engraved _View of the Royal College of Eton_, after a drawing made by
Cozens, which was published in 1742. It was engraved by John Pine, whose
daughter afterwards became Alexander Cozens’s wife. The existence of
this engraving, which has been noticed by none of the writers on
Cozens’s life, seems to point to the probability that the artist came to
England at least four years earlier than has been supposed. It also
shows how little we know about Cozens’s early life, and it suggests a
certain amount of scepticism about the constantly repeated statements on
this subject which rest, apparently, either on dubious authority or on
authority which has not or cannot be verified.
Alexander Cozens’s work attracted little attention in modern times until
the late Mr. Herbert Home perceived its beauties. Public attention was
first drawn to it by the “Historical Collection of British
Water-Colours” organized by the Walpole Society in the Loan Exhibition
held at the Grafton Galleries at the end of 1911, which included five
beautiful drawings by Cozens. This was followed, in 1916, by an
exhibition of Mr. Home’s collection of drawings with special reference
to the works of Alexander Cozens, held by the Burlington Fine Arts Club.
To the catalogue of this exhibition Mr. Laurence Binyon contributed a
valuable article on “Alexander Cozens and his Influence on English
Painting.” In this article Mr. Binyon does justice to Cozen’s
originality of design and to the emotional power of his drawings. “In
his freest vein he uses his brush with a loose impetuosity which reminds
one curiously of Chinese monochrome sketches--the kind of work beloved
by those Chinese artists who valued spontaneous freshness and personal
expressiveness above all else in landscape.” “It was indeed,” Mr. Binyon
adds, “the naked elements” (of landscape structure) “rather than the
superficial aspects of a scene which appealed to his imagination; and in
nature it was the solitary and the spacious rather than the agreeably
picturesque which evoked his deepest feelings.”
Alexander Cozens used colour sparingly and seldom. His best drawings are
either in bistre or in indian ink, and he was fond of working on
stained, or perhaps oiled, paper (which was formerly used for tracing).
Such paper has doubtless acquired a darker tone with age, and it adds to
the “sombreness” of which contemporaries complained in his drawings.
JOHN ROBERT COZENS
[Son of Alexander Cozens, born 1752; made sketching tour in Switzerland
and Italy, with R. Payne Knight, 1776-1779; again visited Switzerland
and Italy, this time in company with William Beckford, 1782; became
insane, 1794; died, it is said, 1799.
EXHIBITED: Society of Artists, 1767-’71; Royal Academy, 1776.
WORKS IN PUBLIC GALLERIES: V. and A. Museum (Water-Colours);
British Museum; National Gallery of Ireland; Manchester Whitworth
Institute; Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Oldham Art Gallery
(Charles E. Lees’ Collection); Manchester Art Gallery (James Blair
Bequest).
BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES: Edwards’s “Anecdotes”; Leslie’s
“Handbook”; Redgrave’s “Century” and “Dictionary”; “D. N. B.”
REPRODUCTIONS: Cosmo Monkhouse’s, Finberg’s, Hughes’s and Rich’s
works, already cited; THE STUDIO, Feb. 1917.]
It is really surprising that we know so little about this artist. During
his lifetime his works were much sought after, and he must have been
personally known to a number of distinguished people; both Payne Knight
and the eccentric millionaire, William Beckford, the author of “Vathek,”
and owner and rebuilder of Fonthill Abbey, with whom he travelled in
Italy and Switzerland, and who both possessed a large number of his
drawings, were voluminous writers, yet neither has deigned to tell us
anything of interest about the character, personality, or even outward
appearance of this very great artist. Both Beckford and Knight wrote
accounts of their travels, but one searches them in vain for a single
word that would prove that these highly intelligent men had the shadow
of a notion that the quiet and unobtrusive young “draughtsman” in their
employ was one of the greatest artists their country had produced.
We do not know for certain where or when John Cozens was born nor when
he died. Roget says he “appears to have been born abroad when his parent
was giving lessons in Bath,” but he gives no authority for the
statement, and so far as I know it has not been verified. The best
evidence for the date of his birth seems to be Leslie’s statement that
he once saw a small pen-drawing on which was written, “Done by J.
Cozens, 1761, when nine years of age.” If the date is correct Cozens was
only fifteen when he began to exhibit at the Society of Artists.
Constable stated that Cozens died in 1796, but most of the authorities
give the date as 1799.
That the artist was modest and unobtrusive, like his drawings, we may
feel sure. As Leslie wrote, “So modest and unobtrusive are the beauties
of his drawings that you might pass them without notice, for the painter
himself never says ‘Look at this, or that,’ he trusts implicitly to your
own taste and feeling; and his works are full of half-concealed beauties
such as Nature herself shows but coyly, and these are often the most
fleeting appearances of light. Not that his style is without emphasis,
for then it would be insipid, which it never is, nor ever in the least
commonplace.”
Constable was one of the first to realize Cozens’s true greatness.
“Cozens,” he said, “is all poetry,” and on another occasion he rather
shocked Leslie by asserting that Cozens was “the greatest genius that
ever touched landscape.” Yet this assertion contains nothing but the
plain truth. Genius is the only word we can use to describe the intense
concentration of mind and feeling which inspires Cozens’s work. To the
analytic eye his drawings are baffling and bewildering in the extreme;
it is impossible to find a trace of cleverness or conscious artifice in
them. They make you feel that you are looking at the work of a
somnambulist or of one who has painted in a trance. They are, I believe,
the most incorporeal paintings which have been produced in the Western
world, for the paint and the execution seem to count for so little and
the personal inspiration for so much. The painter’s genius seems to
speak to you direct, and to impress and overawe you without the help of
any intermediary.
In this respect Cozens is quite different from Turner. Even when he
trusted most implicitly to his genius Turner was always the great
artist, the great colourist, the incomparable master of his technique
whatever medium he was working in. Beyond the sheer beauty of his simple
washes of transparent colour there is hardly a single technical or
executive merit in Cozens’s drawings that one can single out for praise
or even for notice. Their haunting beauty and incomparable power are
spiritual, not material. And as we can think of a spirit too pure and
fine to inhabit a gross body like our own, so Cozens seems to be a
genius too spiritual for form and colour and the palpable artifices of
representation. Certainly no English artist relied more serenely and
confidently on his genius, and subdued his art more absolutely to
spiritual purposes. And this is what I think Constable meant when he
called Cozens “the greatest genius that ever touched landscape”; he did
not say that he was the greatest artist.
As one of our illustrations we reproduce the drawing _Lake Albano and
Castel Gandolfo_ by Cozens (Plate I) in the collection of Mr. C. Morland
Agnew.
THOMAS GIRTIN
[Born in Southwark, 1775; apprenticed to Edward Dayes; first engravings
after his drawings published in “Copper Plate Magazine,” 1793; sketching
tours, in the Midlands (Lichfield, etc.), 1794, Kent and Sussex 1795,
Yorkshire and Scotland 1796, Devonshire 1797, Wales 1798, Yorkshire and
Scotland 1799; “Girtin’s Sketching Society” established, 1799; married,
1800; went to Paris, Nov. 1801, and returned to England, May 1802; his
_Eidometropolis_, or Great Panorama of London, exhibited at Spring
Gardens, August, 1802; died Nov. 9, 1802; engravings of his views of
Paris published shortly after his death.
EXHIBITED: Royal Academy, 1794, ’95, ’97-1801.
WORKS IN PUBLIC GALLERIES: V. and A. Museum (Water-Colours);
British Museum; National Galleries of Scotland and Ireland;
Manchester Whitworth Institute; Ashmolean and Fitzwilliam Museums;
Oldham Art Gallery (Charles E. Lees’ Collection).
BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES: Edwards’s “Anecdotes”; Dayes’
“Professional Sketches”; Redgrave’s “Century” and “Dictionary”;
B.F.A. Club’s Catalogue, 1875; Roget’s “History”; Binyon’s “Life
and Works,” 1900; Walpole Society’s Vols. II. and V.
REPRODUCTIONS: Binyon’s “Life”; Monkhouse’s, Finberg’s, Hughes’s,
Lytton’s, and Rich’s works already cited; THE STUDIO (Centenary of
Thomas Girtin Number), Nov. 1902; THE STUDIO, May 1916; Walpole
Society’s Vols. II. and V.]
Compared with John Cozens’s work Girtin’s appears often self-conscious
and artificial. His drawings were admired by his contemporaries chiefly
on account of their style; references to the “sword-play” of his
pencil, the boldness and swiftness of his washes, constantly recur in
their eulogies of his work. Girtin was nearly always a stylist, and
often a mannerist. But his style, at its best, is so thoroughly in
keeping with the spirit of his work that it is difficult to separate the
two. His love of the sweeping lines of the open moorland and his passion
for height and space appeal irresistibly to our imagination, while the
broad simplicity of his vision, his restrained and truthful colour, and
his frank, bold, decisive handling seem the only adequate means by which
his inspiration could find clear and authoritative expression.
We must remember, too, that Girtin died at the age of twenty-seven. The
knowledge of his early and untimely death intensifies our admiration for
all he did; while the few supreme masterpieces of poetical landscape he
has left us, like the _Plinlimmon_, show clearly what our national art
lost by the tragedy of his early death.
Girtin seems to have mastered his art as Robert Louis Stevenson mastered
his, by “playing the sedulous ape” to the men he admired. There are now
in the British Museum copies he made after Antonio Canal, Piranesi,
Hearne, Marlow, and Morland. Of these masters Canal seems to have
impressed and taught him most. The spaciousness and breadth of effect of
all his topographical work are clearly the outcome of his admiration for
Canal’s drawings and paintings. The calligraphic quality of his line
work, what has been called the “sword-play” of his pencil, is also due
to the same influence.
His earlier drawings, made about 1792 and 1793, were, however, modelled
on the style of his master, Edward Dayes. The drawings he made after
James Moore’s sketches--of which several have been recently acquired by
the Ashmolean Museum--might easily be mistaken for Dayes’ work. They
only differ in being more accomplished and workmanlike than those which
his master made for the same patron, and in their deliberate avoidance
of the dark “repoussoir” of which Dayes was so fond in his
foregrounds--an avoidance which gives Girtin’s drawings a greater unity
and a more decorative effect than those of Dayes.
By about 1795 Girtin’s real style began to assert itself, in drawings
like those of Lichfield and Peterborough Cathedrals. From this time we
find him pouring forth an abundance of superb topographical subjects
instinct with style and ennobled with poetry and imagination--drawings
like _Rievaulx Abbey_ (1798), in the V. and A. Museum, _Carnarvon
Castle_, and _The Old Ouse Bridge, York_, both in the possession of his
great-grandson, Mr. Thomas Girtin. The noble studies for his Panorama of
London (made probably in 1801), his _Lindisfarne_ (?1797) and
_Bridgnorth_ (1802), are fortunately in the British Museum. The drawings
he made on his return from Paris, during the last sad months of his
fast-ebbing life--drawings like the _Porte St. Denis_--are amongst the
most superb of his splendid productions.
I will close these brief and inadequate remarks by copying out two
advertisements connected with Girtin’s “Panorama” which I believe have
not been printed or referred to by any one of the writers on his life
and work. The first appeared in “The Times” on August 27, 1802. It runs
as follows: “_Eidometropolis_, or Great Panoramic Picture of London,
Westminster, and Environs, now exhibiting at the Great Room, Spring
Gardens, Admission 1_s._ T. Girtin returns his most grateful thanks to a
generous Public for the encouragement given to his Exhibition, and as it
has been conceived to be merely a Picture framed, he further begs leave
to request of the Public to notice that it is Panoramic, and from its
magnitude, which contains 1944 square feet, gives every object the
appearance of being the size of nature. The situation is so chosen as to
shew to the greatest advantage the Thames, Somerset House, the Temple
Gardens, all the Churches, Bridges, principal Buildings, &c., with the
surrounding country to the remotest distance, interspersed with a
variety of objects characteristic of the great Metropolis. His views of
Paris, etched by himself, are in great forwardness, and to be seen with
the Picture as above.”
The second notice is as follows: “Thursday, 11 Nov., 1802. The Public
are most respectfully informed that in consequence of the decease of Mr.
Thomas Girtin, his Panorama of London exhibiting at Spring Gardens, will
be shut till after his interment, when it will be re-opened for the
benefit of his widow and children, under the management of his brother,
Mr. John Girtin.”
As an example of Girtin’s work we reproduce _The Valley of the Aire with
Kirkstall Abbey_ (Plate II), from Mr. Thomas Girtin’s collection.
JOSEPH MALLORD WILLIAM TURNER
[Born in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, 23 April, 1775; worked in Life
Academy, R.A. schools, 1792-1799; A.R.A., 1799, R.A. 1802; first tour on
Continent, 1802; first part of “Liber Studiorum” issued, 1807; Professor
of Perspective, R.A., 1807-1837; _Crossing the Brook_ exhibited 1815;
published “Southern Coast” series of engravings, 1814-1826, “Views in
Sussex,” 1816-1820, Hakewill’s “Italy,” 1818-1820, “Richmondshire,”
1818-1823, “Provincial Antiquities of Scotland,” 1819-1826, “England and
Wales,” 1827-1838, Rogers’s “Italy,” 1830, and “Poems,” 1834, “Rivers of
France,” 1833-1835; exhibited _Rain, Steam, and Speed_, 1844; died Dec.
18, 1851.
EXHIBITED: Royal Academy, 1790-1804, ’06-’20, ’22, ’23, ’25-’47,
’49, ’50; British Institution, 1806, ’8, ’9, ’14, ’17, ’35-’41,
’46; Society of British Artists, 1833, ’34; Institution for Enc. of
F.A., Edinburgh, 1824; Cooke’s Exhibitions, 1822-’24; Northern
Academy of Arts, Newcastle, 1828; R. Birmingham S. of Artists,
1829, ’30, ’34, ’35, ’47; Liverpool Academy, 1831, ’45; R.
Manchester Institution, 1834, ’35; Leeds Exhibition, 1839.
WORKS IN PUBLIC GALLERIES: National Gallery; V. and A. Museum;
British Museum; National Galleries of Ireland and Scotland;
Ashmolean and Fitzwilliam Museums; Manchester Whitworth Institute;
Bury Art Gallery, etc. etc.
BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES: Peter Cunningham’s Memoir, in
John Burnet’s “Turner and his Works,” 1852; Alaric Watts’s Memoir,
in “Liber Fluviorum,” 1853; Ruskin’s “Modern Painters” and
“Preterita”; Thornbury’s “Life, etc.,” 2 vols., 1862; Hamerton’s
“Life,” 1879; Monkhouse’s “Turner” (in “Great Artists Series”),
1882; C. F. Bell’s “Exhibited Works of Turner,” 1901; Sir Walter
Armstrong’s “Turner,” 1902; Finberg’s “Turner’s Sketches and
Drawings,” 1910; etc. etc.