The development of British landscape painting in water-coloursFinberg, A. J. (Alexander Joseph)
History
The development of British landscape painting in water-colours
Finberg, A. J. (Alexander Joseph)
Landscape painting, British; Watercolor painting, British
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.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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