Part 2

After thirteen years’ residence in Hereford, Cox determined to return to London. He felt the need for opportunities of intercourse with his brother artists and for a wider scope for his art. When he had left London at the end of 1814 he had been surrounded by difficulties, and his prospects had seemed far from bright. But in 1827 the outlook had brightened. The trade of the country, fostered by many years of peace, was now flourishing, and Cox himself was now possessed of a certain but very small income. For though Cox’s name was by this time fairly well known in the world of art he had often to face the unpleasant experience of finding the whole of the twenty or thirty drawings he had exhibited with the Water Colour Society returned unsold. When his drawings did sell they commanded only very small prices, as the following entry from his account book shows:

“1830.

July 5. Five water-colour drawings, _viz._, _Calais Pier_, _View in Ghent_, _Boat in the Scheldt near Dort_, _Minehead_, and _Landscape in Wales_--price for the five, £12.”

It was not till about 1836 that anything like a sustained demand for his work came into existence. Even then, it was only his smaller drawings that he could readily dispose of, and these only at the modest prices of £5 or £6 each. Consequently, in London as in Hereford, it was upon his work as a drawing-master that Cox had to rely for the main part of his income.

It can scarcely be doubted that the effect upon Cox’s art of this constant drudgery of teaching was mischievous. Besides frittering away the best part of his time, thus preventing him from attempting works that required sustained efforts, it had a tendency to force a mechanical and facile dexterity upon his style--a quality hopelessly at variance with all the most sincerely felt contents of his work. For the business of the drawing-master in those days was very different from that which now devolves upon an art-master. To-day a teacher of art does little more than criticise the work which his pupils produce. In Cox’s time a drawing-master had to go from one pupil’s house to another, making a display of his own accomplishments. His lessons resolved themselves into the making of show pieces. He sat down before the pupil and “showed how it was done,” and the professional success of the teacher depended largely upon the admiration he could excite in his pupils or their parents and guardians at the apparent ease and rapidity with which he could manufacture plausible imitations of works of art. That the habit of working to excite the astonishment of the ignorant and uncritical tended to bring something of commonness into Cox’s style can hardly be doubted. That the daily round of making a show of himself and his beloved art must have been peculiarly galling to a man of Cox’s simple and transparently honest nature, needs little evidence. We can scarcely wonder when his sympathetic biographer tells us that at times he would say to his wife, “Oh, Mary, I cannot go out this morning to teach--I feel I cannot do it.” At these times it required all his wife’s powers of persuasion to induce him to overcome his repugnance; often she had to put on her bonnet and mantle and accompany him to the pupil’s house.

In 1840, _i.e._, at the age of fifty-seven, Cox determined to cut himself free from these depressing duties, and to devote the remainder of his days to more purely artistic labours. By his own and his wife’s frugality he had been able to save enough money to secure his old age against want, and his son, who was now married and settled in London as an artist, was able and willing to take over his father’s teaching connection. Besides, Cox was tired of the noise and bustle of London, and anxious to live among more rural surroundings. He therefore began to look out for a house on the outskirts of Birmingham, his native town. His choice fell upon an old house in Greenfield Lane, in the village of Harborne, about two and a half miles from Birmingham, into which he and his wife moved on June 20, 1841.

The house stood in a lane leading to Harborne Church, beyond which meadows and open country stretched out in the direction of Hagley. The garden was a large one, surrounded on both sides by trees, and Cox took great interest in it, often working there himself. He enjoyed cultivating broad-leaved plants, such as rhubarb and the various kinds of docks, and he was especially fond of Scotch thistles and hollyhocks. At Harborne, he spent some of the happiest years of his life; he was happy in his home, in his work, and in his surroundings. As Mr. Solly says, “Cox’s wants were few and simple; his ambition took no flight beyond the constant aim of his life, namely, to excel in the practice of his art. The inexhaustible wealth of nature, his genius, and the love of his family and friends, sufficed to fill his cup with more happiness than is allotted to most men; even when his steps were fast approaching that goal to which all human efforts tend, he was still serene and generally cheerful.” We need not wonder that the most moving and powerful of all the artist’s works were painted after his removal to Harborne.

From 1841 to the end in 1859, Cox’s artistic career was one of unbroken, though limited, success. The weight of years only strengthened the grim certainty with which he grasped the essentials of his art. All his drawing-master dexterity gradually fell away from him, the trivialities of imitative and explanatory art were quietly eliminated, and his art took on the simplicity, the sincerity, and rugged human dignity of the man’s own character.

Of the visits to Bettwys-y-Coed, of the painting of such masterpieces as _The Welsh Funeral_, _The Peat Gatherers_, _Lancaster Sands_, _Green Lanes_, and _Going to the Hayfield_, of his superb work in oil colour, and indeed of all the closing events of the artist’s life, it is impossible here to speak in detail. The whole story has been well and fully told by admiring friends like Mr. Hall and Mr. Solly, who were intimately associated with the life they describe, and to whose pages the reader may be warmly recommended.

Reproductions of a number of charcoal and chalk sketches belonging to this later period of his life have been included in the present volume. Large charcoal drawings like _The Salt Marsh_ (Plate XXV.), _The Beach_ (Plate XXVII.), _Windy Weather_ (Plate XXVIII.), and _The Hill Side_ (Plate XXXIII.), lose something of their impressiveness when reduced in size, as these have necessarily been, but enough remains, even in this form, of their freshness, largeness of conception and sense of movement, to delight the intelligent amateur. No one at all susceptible to the higher beauties of art could remain insensible to the fascination of the bold, synthetic handling of _The Peasants on Horseback_ (Plate III.). In some of these late sketches--notably in the two _Near Kenilworth_ (Plates VII. and XXIV.)--the loose, flowing touch often seems a trifle too disdainful of the individual forms of objects. But when the artist is serenely self-possessed his style is delightfully intimate and unbuttoned, a candid revelation of his sympathies and moods. When thoroughly interested he becomes astonishingly vivid and succinct, as in the _Kirkby Stephen_ (Plate XX.), _Llanrwst_ (Plate XVI.), and _Clapham, Yorkshire_ (Plate XXII.). How much his art had become a matter of feeling and impulse is shown by the glaring way he fails when his sympathies have not been aroused; the draughtsmanship of the _Architectural Study_ (Plate XXII.) is about as bad as draughtsmanship can well be--bald, perfunctory, external. The pencil and stump drawing of _Carnarvon Castle_ (Plate XXX.), for all its lightness and charm of atmospheric suggestion, is “mappy” in draughtsmanship--its drawing being mere “spacing,” without intimacy in the form or sympathy with the structure. The drawing of _Rotterdam_ (Plate XLI.) is again external and unsympathetic. These drawings might well have been chosen as illustrations of the truth of one of Cox’s own remarks: “Merely to paint” (or draw) “is not enough, for when no interest is felt nothing is more natural than that none should be conveyed.”

From the passages quoted above from his “Treatise on Landscape Painting and Effect”--in which this remark occurs--it is evident that Cox must be classed among the Idealists rather than among the Realists or Naturalists. The character of a picture, he insists, should be determined by the character and appropriate sentiments of its principal object; “every other object introduced should be subservient to it, and the attraction of the one should be the attraction of the whole,” he writes. He insists upon the necessity “of becoming thoroughly acquainted with and obtaining a proper feeling of the subject,” and maintains that “the picture should be complete and perfect in the mind before it is ever traced upon the canvas.” And these were undoubtedly the principles upon which his finest works were wrought. It is obviously a mistake to class such a man with the realists or naturalists who place scientific before artistic considerations, though it is easy to understand how the Mid-Victorians made such a blunder. They confused what the language of the schools describes as objective idealism with subjective idealism. Compared with the emptiness and vapidity of a Barret, Cox may well have seemed realistic and naturalistic. But his work has nothing of the disjunctive observation or cold-blooded, rationalistic, inventory-making of a typical realist like John Brett. Cox paints what Reynolds has called “the unadulterated habits of nature.” He never aims at “deceiving the eye,” “nor will he waste a moment upon those smaller objects which only serve to catch the sense” and “divide the attention.” The one great design he always keeps in view is that of “speaking to the heart.”

It would be useless to pretend that Cox is altogether free from the defects of his qualities. He is often too general, vague and empty. Sometimes he is passive and timid, as though he hoped to get his effects by merely “leaving out,” or by overlooking and scorning the individuality of natural objects. But he possesses in abundance the great and inspiriting virtues of the idealists, as well as some of their defects. He takes us away from the world of bare unrelated fact into regions where the human consciousness can beat its wings and feel glad. His art is of the centre, thoroughly typical and national. He deals only with essentials, with those dumb longings and primary passions that form the obscure groundwork of life itself. His place is certainly among the great figures of English art, beside Constable and Cozens and Girtin, as one of the seers and prophets of the tenderness and strength of the nation’s character.

I should like to take this opportunity to thank Mr. A. Walker, of 118, New Bond Street--to whose kindness the publishers and editor are indebted for permission to publish this selection from Cox’s drawings and sketches--for his courtesy in permitting me to examine at my leisure the whole of the drawings, sketches and sketch books of David Cox which he is fortunate enough to possess.

ILLUSTRATIONS