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.)
H. G. HINE
Strangely little notice, considering the artistic importance of the subject, has been taken of the death of H. G. Hine, the eminent artist in water-colours, vice-president of the Royal Institute, who died a fortnight ago, aged eighty-three years. The explanation, I fear, of the scanty comment his death has evoked, is to be sought in the fact that the mass of that public which concerns itself with Art at all, is occupied chiefly with such art as exhibits an easy piquancy of treatment or an obvious interest of subject. Hine’s did neither; yet the best-equipped critics have long done justice to the steady perfection with which he dealt with those themes of serene weather upon ‘the billows of the Downs,’ which—superlatively though they were executed by him—he, with a hankering sometimes after other compositions and other effects, declined to consider his speciality. Yet a speciality, of course, they were: those visions of turquoise or of opal sky, and of grey gold or of embrowned gold turf, with the long, restful sweeps and subtle curves, the luminous shadows, the points of light, with the shepherd and his flock on the ascending hillside, with the ancient thorn-tree bent by the winds of many an autumn.
Singularly unlike the work of strange refinement and unsurpassed subtlety which it was his wont to produce, was Hine himself, with his sturdy and sailorlike personality. Yet the character of the man was, in truth, not less admirable than the artistic finesse of his work. He found his true path somewhat late in life. His genius came to him almost as tardily, but then, perhaps, almost as powerfully, as did David Cox’s. He was long past fifty when—with a charm of composition not less certain than Copley Fielding’s, and with the genius of a far finer and fuller colourist—he began to do justice to the Sussex Downs, amid whose generally unconsidered scenery it had been his excellent fortune to be born.
(Academy, 30th March 1895.)