That in referring to “urgent and repeated solicitations” he was not using a mere figure of speech is likely enough, for in those days plenty of people wanted to be taught and the master who knew his business was very much in request. Drawing and water-colour painting were reckoned as elegant accomplishments which formed a necessary part of a polite education, and there was not only a host of amateurs who were ready to learn but a number of professional students as well with a real desire to become proficient in a new and attractive form of practice in which art patrons and collectors were showing themselves to be much interested. The official type of art school with which we are familiar to-day was almost non-existent—or at all events there were few such places available for the amateur—so the private teacher had to supply the deficiency and to assume a position of considerable responsibility. However, it cannot be disputed that he filled this position in a way that brought him credit and that what he had to do was done with marked efficiency.
Certainly, the students then had privileges which we to-day can justly envy. They were extraordinarily fortunate in their teachers, for they were able to obtain instruction from some of the greatest masters whom this country has produced. Turner, De Wint, Cotman and David Cox, and many other men of distinction who were their contemporaries were actively engaged in teaching during some part of their lives and by their genius and experience they raised greatly the standard of popular taste and fostered a feeling for art in social circles. Moreover, by their practice and precept they developed the new art of painting in water colours from a tentative and timid form of expression into something splendidly robust and full of brilliant possibilities.
It may, perhaps, seem a matter for regret that an artist of rare capacities, like David Cox, should have apparently wasted in the drudgery of teaching so much of the time which he might have employed to advantage in following his profession as a painter. But by his work as a drawing-master he not only created a public which learned eventually to show an effective appreciation of his productions, but he also helped on a movement which was of benefit to others as well as himself. If the art in which he excelled had been taught only by the less competent men it would scarcely have secured so quickly such a large measure of recognition; it was the ability of the teachers to prove how great were its possibilities that ensured its acceptance and established its authority.
Still, it must be admitted that many of these men whom we now rank as masters became teachers from necessity rather than choice. At the end of the eighteenth century it was often difficult for a young artist to earn a living; pictures fetched low prices and the demand for them was uncertain, so he had to seek out other sources of income. Teaching, badly paid as it was, was a very real help and the man who could secure a good connection in schools and among private pupils was able to maintain himself while he was waiting to find buyers for his works. If the patrons failed to appear he remained a teacher to the end of his days, counting himself fortunate if he was able to hold his own against the competition of younger men who were ready to oust him from his place.
David Cox was decidedly one of those who were forced into teaching by circumstances, for he was born of humble parents and had from early life to make his way in the world by his own exertions. He had during his childhood some small amount of art training and when he was barely seventeen he began to work as a scene-painter, first in Birmingham, where he was born, and afterwards in London. But even then he was a serious student of nature with ambitions to become a landscape painter, and soon after he came to London he took the opportunity to get some lessons from John Varley in water-colour painting. In this new art he made such satisfactory progress that he gave up his theatrical work, devoting himself, instead, to landscape painting and teaching. Even then he was only twenty-two and he had still much to learn to fit himself for the career on which he was entering; but so assiduous was he in his study of nature and so consistent in his effort to acquire a full command of technical processes that he was able at the age of thirty—in 1813—to secure election as a member of the Society of Painters in Water Colours. This election can be taken as evidence that he was already regarded by his fellow-artists as a man of some distinction in his profession. But the same year brought other evidences of his growing success, for it saw his appointment as drawing-master in the Military Academy at Farnham, and also the issue of the first parts of his “Treatise on Landscape Painting,” in which he was able to talk about the “repeated solicitations” of his pupils and to imply that his position as a teacher was one which justified him in speaking with authority about matters of technical practice.
Yet, with what he might regard as a fairly established place in the world he was by no means relieved from his struggles for existence. He had advanced, it is true, beyond the stage when he was glad to get a couple of guineas a dozen for the drawings which he sold to dealers, but his smaller works still fetched only a few shillings and a large one not more than five or six pounds. It was necessary for him to work very hard and to practise the strictest economy to maintain himself and his wife and child, and it was impossible for him to do without the earnings which teaching brought him. It was probably for this reason that in 1814, when he gave up his post at the Military Academy because he felt the work there to be unsuited to him, he left London and settled in Hereford, where teaching engagements in schools and private families were plentiful and where he was able to take in pupil-boarders.
At Hereford he remained for nearly fourteen years, but he visited London annually and he made periodical sketching excursions to different parts of the British Isles and occasionally abroad. Eventually he returned to London and lived at Kennington until 1841, when he moved once again, this time to Harbourne, a suburb of his native town, Birmingham, where he died in 1859. Slowly but surely he built up his reputation, more slowly still he increased his income and added to his savings, but it was not until his final departure from London that he was able to free himself from his responsibilities as a teacher and to devote the whole of his energies to painting.
Indeed, the move to Harbourne was made partly to obtain leisure for practice in oil painting, as he had conceived a somewhat sudden desire to acquire a mastery of that medium. He had used oils many years before, but for sketches rather than finished pictures; the ambition to achieve more in this direction came to him about 1839, when he made the acquaintance of W. J. Muller and watched that extraordinarily skillful painter at work. Cox, who was then a man of fifty-six, became a sort of pupil of the younger artist and accepted hints from him with characteristic humility—he is reported to have said on one occasion during a technical demonstration, “You see, Mr. Muller, I can’t paint.”
However, if such a remark were justifiable in 1839, it was certainly subject to considerable modification very few years later, for Cox, once started in the right direction, developed quickly into an oil painter of unquestionable distinction. He never, perhaps, reached quite the same degree of proficiency which he had attained in water colours, but he did work which was worthy of him and he added many fine canvases to the series which generation by generation has been built up by the masters of British landscape. Fortunately, he did not devote the whole of his time to pursuit of new methods, indeed, to this final period of his life belong some of the greatest of his water-colour paintings—possibly practice with oils heightened his keenness of vision and increased the strength with which he handled the more delicate medium, and no doubt freedom from distractions enabled him to work more deliberately and with closer concentration.
If Cox’s career is judged by the conventional money standard it would be scarcely possible to say that he achieved success, for at no time were his earnings large—he is said to have only once received £100 for a picture—and the small competence which he amassed in his later years would have seemed merely poverty to anyone less modest and simple-minded. But if he is measured by the true standard, of accomplishment, he can be reckoned as successful in the highest degree. His paintings are distinguished by an exquisite perception of the great facts of nature and by a consistent significance of interpretation, they have a most attractive individuality, and their technical mastery is exceptionally convincing—they put him definitely among the leaders of the British school. As a teacher he had a wide and wholesome influence because he sought to impress upon his pupils his own sincere belief that nature is and always must be the right source of an artist’s inspiration, and because he tried to make them devout and serious students like himself.