It remained for the Norwich Art Circle to hold, for the first time,
an exhibition of the drawings of an artist who was nothing less than
a great master in water-colour, but whose place in the ranks of Art
was for many a year, by the general public, not so much contested as
ignored. Cotman was born a few years after Turner. Possessed of a
sensibility as keen, but of less tremendous vitality, he died a few
years before him. Turner was amongst Cotman’s friends; not a ‘chum,’
perhaps, but an advocate, strenuous and judicious--and strenuous and
judicious advocacy may claim to be called friendship. Had it not been
for Turner, it is unlikely that the less-known artist would have
received that post at King’s College which afforded him comfort, though
not affluence, in the last years of his life. Like Dewint, Cotman
taught drawing. But in London his connection was less influential
than that of Dewint, whose usual fee of a guinea an hour was no doubt
never reached by the draughtsman from Norwich. The appointment of
drawing-master at King’s College was therefore very serviceable: the
more so that Cotman’s original work, though it was produced with
the enthusiasm and the untiring enjoyment, and the sweat of the
brow besides, which in any art are the real artist’s equivalents or
substitutes for mechanical diligence--Cotman’s original work, I say
(like a little of Mozart’s best music), was produced ‘for himself and
two friends.’ Even the connoisseur, as a rule, held back. The public?
But can you for an instant expect the public to understand work which,
frankly, makes no bid for its sympathies, which is never furnished
‘according to sample,’ which is bound to be itself and wholly fresh,
and is content to be excellent? An intelligent criticism might perhaps
have drummed into the big public, not the real sense, but at all events
some tacit acceptance, of Cotman’s peculiar merit. But where was the
intelligent criticism of 1820 and 1830? There was little critical
writing then--at all events in the papers--that was either an influence
or an art.
John Sell Cotman was born at Norwich on the 16th of May 1782. His
father was a well-to-do haberdasher, established at that time in Cockey
Lane, but afterwards, when able to retire from business, living in a
villa at Thorpe, with a garden that looked on the river. Cotman himself
drew the garden--and idealised it--in the last year of his life. His
father survived him; dying very old--at eighty-four. Cotman died at
sixty.
Whatever troubles there had been on the subject of Cotman’s trade or
profession, they were got over by the simple process of his going his
own way, and of his father’s forgiving him. The boy was educated at
the grammar school, and at sixteen years old, after much discussion
about his future--after the interposition of Opie, with the not very
measured remark that the boy ‘had far better black shoes than be
an artist’--young Cotman chose the less desirable of these unhappy
alternatives, and, that he might be an artist, journeyed to London. A
young man at that period, and especially a young man who was wishing to
be a landscape painter, had little opportunity of artistic training,
unless indeed it might be that best kind of training which consists in
familiarity with people of mind, and with the works of art that bygone
genius has produced, and with those natural scenes which, like the
voice or the face of your friend, stimulate and enrich and endow with
a new experience. Cotman in these things was happy. He was trained by
the world, and by those lessons in noble by-past Art which he was so
well fitted to receive. His own true taste, and the faculty of real
development--which some of us call, like Wordsworth, ‘a leading from
above: a something given’--made him independent of academic influence;
and in his case no one undertook the academic task, and made the
too-confident promise to turn into fine gold what is brass at the
beginning, and must be brass to the end. Cotman was fine gold. He was,
that is to say, an artist born, not manufactured.
At the hospitable house of Dr. Munro, in the Adelphi Terrace, the young
man fell into association with a group of painters, most of whom were
his seniors. At eighteen years old he exhibited six drawings at the
Royal Academy, and while he was still extremely young, he presided
over a little society--a sketching club, one may call it--of which
Varley and Dr. Munro were members. At very moderate prices his drawings
seem to have found a sale, and he began to make excursions into
remote parts of the country--into Yorkshire and Lincolnshire--besides
visiting his family at Norwich. It was either at Norwich or Yarmouth,
in the first years of the century, that he made the acquaintance of
Dawson Turner, the antiquary. That acquaintance became a friendship,
and, to use the phrase of Charles Lamb in regard to such matters, ‘a
friendship that answered.’ Dawson Turner was at once, and for many a
year afterwards, a help to Cotman. And as a serious student--not only
a rich dilettante--he knew that he gained as much as Cotman from their
association. ‘We value him greatly,’ Dawson Turner wrote to Cotman’s
father, very long after their first introduction, and when it was
wanted to arouse the father to an understanding of Cotman’s position,
and of his depressed state.
In November 1805 we find Cotman established in Charlotte Street,
Portland Place, writing to Dawson Turner that he had been in
Yorkshire and Durham all the autumn, ‘making many close copies of
the fickle Dame Nature--copies,’ writes Cotman, not very elegantly,
‘consequently valuable on that account.’ A hope of settling in
Norwich--of working, and founding a drawing-class there--was now
growing upon him, and in 1806 it was accomplished. A young bachelor of
four-and-twenty--personally a little extravagant, but taking his art
very seriously--he possessed himself of an excellent house in Luckett’s
Court, Wymer Street. I saw the house this summer. A dignified house,
with gables of the Seventeenth Century, and much of the interior
woodwork seemingly of the early Eighteenth. For six years Cotman lived
there. There, was wrought almost all the best of his earlier art: Mr.
J. J. Colman’s ‘St. Luke’s Chapel’; Mr. Reeve’s ‘Twickenham’ (from a
yet earlier sketch); the same collector’s ‘Mousehold Heath’; my own ewe
lamb, ‘Bishopgate Bridge’; and a mass of work besides--much of which,
unquestionably, has been mislaid, neglected, ruined, forgotten.
The exhibition held at Norwich--to which I began by referring--gave us
an excellent opportunity of really studying this rarer and earlier art.
I am not thinking of the insignificant fact that there was to be seen
there a puerile yet rather clever performance which dates from Cotman’s
twelfth year; but to the assemblage of work of the early time when he
was really an artist--from 1800, say, to 1812. What was the character
of his labour then? With whom did he sympathise? Whom did he at all
resemble? The influence of Turner and of Girtin is to be detected in
some of the work of this period--in the noble architectural work,
especially--and it is not in the slightest degree unlikely that, in his
turn, Cotman exercised some influence over Turner; at a much later time
I mean, when everyday sobriety sufficed for neither of them, and when
Cotman, surely quite as much as Turner, led the way to revelries of
colour. Between Cotman and Girtin there could be no such reciprocity
of influence, for Girtin died, an accomplished master of water-colour,
though less than thirty years old, in 1802, and Cotman was then but
twenty.
Mr. Colman’s large and solid and sober drawing of ‘Durham’ (it has
these qualities, and yet is, somehow, without charm) reminds me of
an early Girtin; while a Girtin of the finer sort, just as simple,
just as straightforward, yet with something of the later magic of the
hand, is recalled by Mr. Reeve’s ‘Bridge over the Greta.’ A quiet
realism; a sense of the picturesque, entertained but yet subdued; a
composition, ordered, yet not seemingly artificial; a breadth that was
never thereafter for a moment departed from--these are, perhaps, the
characteristics of the mature and noble drawings of the earlier period,
such as ‘St. Luke’s Chapel,’ ‘Bishopgate Bridge,’ and ‘Mousehold
Heath.’ Wherever there is opportunity for it--as, in my ‘Bishopgate
Bridge,’ in the yew-tree to the left and the slope of the bank to the
river--there comes in Cotman’s sense of grace, his appreciation of
style and of dignity, his avoidance of mere topography; but it is in
Mr. Reeve’s ‘Twickenham’--thanks to the occasion of which the scene
itself is lavish--that that sense of grace dominates, and the stately
trees throw their shadows over the lawn by the water.
In 1812, Cotman removed to South Town, Yarmouth; Dawson Turner being,
presumably, at the bottom of the change. The painter’s association
with the interesting antiquary became more and more intimate. Purely
architectural, or, as one might say, monumental, draughtsmanship was
at this time a good deal occupying him. He was issuing at the moment
the first part of the _Antiquities of Norfolk_. In the year 1817, he
paid, on the advice of Dawson Turner, a first visit to Normandy. He
went there again in 1819 and 1820; and, two years after the third
visit, his _Architectural Antiquities of Normandy_ saw the light. It
was not until 1838 that he produced the book which best represents
the characteristics of his style--the book in which, fettered by no
established task, his sense of elegance, his genius for composition
in line and in light and shade, had free play--I mean, of course, his
_Liber Studiorum_: soft ground-etchings of unquestioned force and
charm. But at Yarmouth he had much to engage him. His range of subjects
increased. There it was that he acquired the close knowledge of coast
‘effects’ and of marine architecture which made him, in addition to
all his other capacities, so excellent a painter of the shore and sea.
It was in 1823, I think, that Cotman left Yarmouth: a married man in
early middle age, with five young children. He did it to establish
himself again at Norwich, hoping perhaps to sell his pictures better
there, and expecting again to add to his group of pupils--he still went
regularly and frequently to those who learnt of him at Yarmouth. This
time it was only a house opposite the Bishop’s Palace--the address,
‘St. Martin’s at Palace’--that sufficed for Cotman’s needs, or Cotman’s
ambitions. But before long, though he made no change, his mind suffered
tortures from the costliness of his new abode, and the unremunerative
character of the adventure. He went to the Dawson Turners in utter
gloom, and then it was that his excellent friend wrote to him and to
his father letters full of tact, wisdom, and feeling, pointing out to
the well-to-do father that Cotman must really be relieved, and pointing
out, to the now depressed and now exalted genius of a son, that his
position, could he but face it, and retrench a little, was not by any
means so bad. The existence of the letters on this subject allows us
entrance into the intimacy of these housekeeping troubles, and of the
troubles of mind that threatened to be more serious. But we do not
get the end of the story. We can only suppose that Cotman’s father,
who was really on good terms with him, afforded reasonable help, and
that though the house was not moved from with promptitude, the expenses
inside it were curtailed. Cotman rubbed on, somehow, and in 1834 he
received the appointment which I spoke of at the beginning--that post
of drawing-master at King’s College, London, which he was to retain
till his death.
Preparing to quit Norwich, and wishing to put money in his purse before
doing so, he had a sale by auction of many of his effects. These
included nearly twenty of his paintings in oil, and five guineas was
the highest price realised for any one of them. He sold, likewise,
some copies of his printed book: the demand proving by no means
‘active’--they were indeed rather ‘quiet’ than ‘lively’ or ‘firm’--but
of the drawings he wisely kept back all that were still in his
possession: they were destined to be serviceable in his King’s College
lessons.
After a brief sojourn in Gerrard Street, Soho--a mere preparatory
time--Hunter Street, Brunswick Square, was the spot fixed upon by
Cotman for his London home. But he went down to Norwich still, now and
then, in the autumn. His son, ‘J. J.,’ already gifted, and afterwards
eccentric, was settled there. Cotman wrote letters to him, in many
moods, now bright and fanciful, now depressed and forlorn. He was fond
of the Thames before the Thames was popular--witness Mr. Reeve’s early
‘Twickenham,’ and Mr. Pyke Thompson’s later ‘Twickenham,’ the ‘Golden
Twickenham’ of the Turner house at Penarth--and in one of those letters
to the son ‘J. J.,’ there is ‘the log’ that records the adventures of
Mr. Cotman’s ‘voyage’ with others of the ship’s company to Windsor,
where they were ‘not victualled from hence’--from London, that is to
say--and so might be expected to put in at Datchet. Then later, the
brightness was all gone, and illness was upon him. ‘It was my duty,
it was my wish, and I threatened to paint for your sake when you were
here, but I could not; I was ill in body, and spiritless.’
Again, still later, ‘I am not quite well, but better. I am
painting.’[5] And then he could paint no more. He died, in Hunter
Street, in July 1842, and was buried on the 30th of that month, in
what is now the dull suburban cemetery behind St. John’s Wood Chapel,
within sound of the cheers from ‘Lord’s’ and the screech of the
Metropolitan Railway.
[5] These letters, some of which belong to Mr. Reeve, and
others to the British Museum, have been quoted from more
amply in my _Studies in English Art_.
The beginning of the later period of Cotman’s art dates rather from the
days of his visits to Normandy than from those of his removal to King’s
College. I used to think that it was a good deal by the composition--by
the theme chosen and by the disposition of its different elements--that
we could best affix some approximate date to the undated work of
this delightful master. And, unquestionably, composition counts; and
the tendency as time advanced was towards a greater elegance in this
matter--a more elaborate art, a franker departure from that Nature
which suffers, in Boucher’s word, the grass to be ‘too green,’ which
‘lacks,’ in Lancret’s answer, ‘harmony and seductiveness.’ But, with
a pretty familiar knowledge, now, of at least a couple of hundred of
Cotman’s sketches and designs--the most accomplished of his work, with
its wise and learned or inspired omissions, is sometimes disparaged as
a ‘sketch’--I am inclined to extend the period during which Cotman’s
art was wont to be wrought into studied fineness of line, and I
would appeal, perhaps, chiefly to colour to settle the question as
to the date of this or that drawing, coming from the hand of one
who was a poet at the beginning and a poet at the end. Undoubtedly,
in the best--in the very best--of Cotman’s later work (in Mr. Pyke
Thompson’s ‘Blue Afternoon,’ for instance, and Mr. Bulwer’s ‘Blasting
St. Vincent’s Rock’), there is a greater freedom of poetic expression
than was reached in the earlier work; an even keener sensibility, an
added love of luxury of hue and of forms that have grandeur sometimes
in their restraint, or elegance in their abandonment. Certain
black-and-white studies done in the last autumn of Cotman’s life--one
October and November, when the country around Norwich lay under flood,
and Cotman, visiting his native city, went out to depict no definite
landscape, but ‘the world afloat’--display that faculty of seizing the
spirit of a thing more than its body, which Youth, in any art, can
hardly claim--which comes to men, it may be, with the refinement and
chastening of the years. But the germs of all this faculty were there
from the first. Cotman was indebted for them to no institution, and to
no outward training. The Heavens had so willed it that his delightful
labour--so sterling, so sober, so poetic--should evade popularity. He
was granted his sensibilities that it should be impossible to vulgarise
him. Through good report and evil report he was an artist only. And so
he accomplished his work.
(_Magazine of Art_, December 1888.)