On books and arts

by Sir Frederick Wedmore

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.