Cotman

Cotman by Frederick Wedmore (1895)

John Sell Cotman received his first solo exhibition only when the Norwich Art Circle mounted a show of his drawings, honoring a water-colourist whose mastery had long gone unrecognized by the wider public. Born at Norwich on 16 May 1782 to a well-to-do haberdasher of Cockey Lane, he was the near-contemporary of Turner, who became his strenuous advocate and whose influence helped secure Cotman the post of drawing-master at King's College late in life. Despite the painter Opie's warning that the boy had better black shoes than become an artist, young Cotman, educated at the grammar school, left for London at sixteen to pursue art. In London he fell in with a circle of painters at Dr. Munro's house in the Adelphi Terrace, exhibited six drawings at the Royal Academy at eighteen, and presided over a small sketching club that included Varley and Dr. Munro. He travelled into Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, and at Norwich or Yarmouth met Dawson Turner, the antiquary, who became a lasting friend and supporter. By November 1805 he was settled in Charlotte Street, Portland Place, and in 1806 established himself and a drawing-class at Norwich, taking a house in Luckett's Court, Wymer Street, where he lived for six years and produced much of his finest early work, including St. Luke's Chapel, Twickenham, Mousehold Heath, and Bishopgate Bridge. In 1812 Cotman moved to South Town, Yarmouth, at Dawson Turner's prompting, turning increasingly to architectural and antiquarian drawing while issuing the Antiquities of Norfolk. In 1817, and again in 1819 and 1820, he visited Normandy on Dawson Turner's advice, publishing his Architectural Antiquities of Normandy two years after the third trip. In 1838 he produced his Liber Studiorum, soft ground-etchings regarded as his most characteristic work. His years at Yarmouth also deepened his knowledge of coastal and marine subjects. In 1823, now married with five young children, Cotman returned to Norwich, taking a house opposite the Bishop's Palace at St. Martin's at Palace, hoping to sell more pictures and gain pupils, though he continued visiting his former students at Yarmouth. The expense of the new house soon distressed him, and Dawson Turner intervened with letters to both Cotman and his father urging retrenchment and reassurance. In 1834 Cotman secured the King's College drawing-mastership, which he held until his death. Before leaving Norwich he auctioned many effects, including nearly twenty oil paintings that fetched no more than five guineas apiece, though he kept back his drawings for teaching use. After a short stay in Gerrard Street, Soho, he settled in Hunter Street, Brunswick Square, still returning to Norwich in autumns, where his son J. J. Cotman had settled. Letters to his son show alternating cheerfulness and depression, including an account of a voyage to Windsor and later expressions of illness and low spirits. He died in Hunter Street in July 1842 and was buried on the 30th of that month behind St. John's Wood Chapel. His later work, developing from the Normandy period onward, grew more elegant in composition and freer in color, as seen in pieces such as Blue Afternoon and Blasting St. Vincent's Rock, and in black-and-white studies of flooded country near Norwich made in the last autumn of his life, capturing "the world afloat." Throughout, his art depended on no academic training but on native sensibility, remaining too individual to achieve wide popularity even as it secured his standing as a true and original master.

By Frederick Wedmore · First published 1895 · Genre: Biography, Art Criticism, Art History · 3,439 words

First lines

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.'

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water-color painting · landscape drawing · biographical essay · art criticism · artistic merit · public indifference · architectural drawing · Norwich · London · Yarmouth · Normandy · 19th century

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