Cotman by Frederick Wedmore — Read

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.