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.]