Part 2

The effect of the grey underpainting on the finished work is, however, largely dependent on the artist’s wishes. If he chooses to sacrifice the luminosity of the white paper he can paint over his preliminary washes with colour so heavily charged that it will practically annihilate them. This is what Girtin generally did in his later works, though it must be added that he also changed the colour of his preparatory washes from grey to brown. I am inclined to think, therefore, that Redgrave has exaggerated the importance of the use or disuse of these preliminary washes.

The earlier poetical painters, like Lambert, and Sandby in his larger compositions painted for exhibition purposes, worked in body-colour, i.e., opaque white was mixed with all the colours. In this way some approximation to the force of oil painting was obtained. Another way of getting a similar result was to work with the paper wet. A good example of this method is Turner’s _Warkworth Castle_. In this picture Turner tries to do in water-colour what Richard Wilson did in oils. He gets his effects of deep rich tone and force of colour by working with a heavily charged brush, sponging, and wiping out the lights with a dry brush or handkerchief or scraping them with a knife.

The methods of _Warkworth Castle_ were practically those used by the younger Barret, Varley, Copley Fielding, Cox, and De Wint, but after about 1830 we find opaque white coming into general use, at first merely to give increased force to the high lights, but later it was mixed freely with all the transparent colours, and toned or tinted paper was used to give greater brilliance to the body-colour. John F. Lewis worked in this way, but the hardness and glitter to which it so easily conduced led to its abandonment by the later artists who set themselves to render the delicate gradations of the atmosphere. Yet one must admit that in the hands of a master technician like Turner all the unpleasant qualities so often apparent in body-colour work can be avoided, as the _Rivers of France_ drawings prove. At the present time some artists, who aim especially at force and brilliance of colour, prefer to work in tempera, but it is doubtful whether this medium can rightly be regarded as a form of water-colour painting.

On the whole we may say that the technique of water-colour has changed very little during the last two centuries. The chief change has perhaps been connected with the introduction, about 1830, of moist colours put up in metal tubes, a great convenience to artists in search of bold effects without the expenditure of much time or trouble. But even this has proved a doubtful advantage, and many artists have now gone back to the use of hard cakes of colour, similar to those with which the earlier men obtained their delicate and luminous results.

(4) SOME FAMOUS WATER-COLOUR PAINTERS OF THE PAST

In the previous section we have deliberately refrained from saying anything about the purely artistic qualities of the works we have referred to. This is because we have been engaged in a strictly historical survey, and to the eye of history there is no difference between the works of a great artist and those of a bungler. Both are equally patent and indubitable facts. It is the business of criticism to appraise the artistic beauty of works of art. And if in our historical survey we have kept our attention fixed generally on the works of the greater men, this is more the result of accident than design. Art criticism has already sifted much of the good from the bad in the work of the past, and it is more convenient, in a general survey of this kind, to deal with what is best known and valued. But because history can thus take advantage of what art criticism has done, that is no reason why we should confuse the two processes, and it cannot be repeated too often that historical importance or interest has nothing whatever to do with artistic value.

The aim of this section is to make good the defects of historical study, so far, at least, as the limited space at our disposal will permit. With this object in view we have selected a baker’s dozen of the more famous artists of the past, and we will endeavour to indicate some of the qualities which make their works a joy and delight to those who have the privilege of knowing them. In each case we will supply, in tabloid form, a certain amount of biographical information, as knowledge of the time and place in which an artist works and the conditions under which he produces helps us to understand what he has done; we shall also attempt to point out the chief public galleries where each artist’s works

can be seen (when happier times bring about the reopening of our museums and art galleries), and the sources from which those who care for it can obtain fuller information and more authoritative criticism than we ourselves can supply. Such information as we can give will be as correct as we can make it, but it will make no claim whatever to be exhaustive.

PAUL SANDBY

[Born at Nottingham, 1725; entered military drawing office of the Tower of London, 1746; draughtsman to a survey of the Northern and Western Highlands, 1748-1751, during which time he published some etchings of Scottish views; worked at Windsor for some years from 1752, where his brother, Thomas, was Deputy Ranger; chief drawing-master, Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, 1768-1797; elected Director of the Society of Artists, October 18, 1766; original member of Royal Academy, 1768; introduced the aquatint method of engraving into England; published first set of twelve aquatints of views in South Wales, 1774, a second set of views in North Wales, 1776, and a third set in 1777; died 1809.

EXHIBITED: Society of Artists, 1760-’68; Royal Academy, 1769-’77, ’79-’82, ’86-’88, ’90-’95, ’97-1802, ’06-’09; Free Society, 1782, ’83.

WORKS IN PUBLIC GALLERIES: National Gallery; V. and A. Museum (Water-Colours); British Museum; National Gallery of Ireland; Greenwich Hospital; Diploma Gallery, R.A.; Manchester Whitworth Institute; Norwich, Nottingham, Glasgow, etc., Art Galleries.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES: “Thomas and Paul Sandby,” by William Sandby, 1892; “D. N. B.”; Roget’s “History of the Old Water-Colour Society,” 1891.

REPRODUCTIONS OF WORKS: “The Earlier English Water-Colour Painters,” by Cosmo Monkhouse; “The English Water-Colour Painters,” by A. J. Finberg; “Early English Water-Colour,” by C. E. Hughes; “Water-Colour,” by the Hon. Neville Lytton; “Water-Colour Painting,” by A. W. Rich; “The Royal Academy” (THE STUDIO Summer Number, 1904); THE STUDIO, Jan. 1918.]

Sandby was one of the most prolific of the earlier topographical artists. His numberless drawings and the engravings he made from them did more than any one man had done before to familiarize Englishmen with the beauties of their native land. He was an indefatigable traveller, and he was the first artist to discover the artistic beauties of Wales.

He worked both in transparent colour and in gouache. His drawings in the latter medium, of which there are several in the V. and A. Museum, are distinctly inferior to his works in pure colour. They are scenic and conventional in design, feeble and pretentious in execution. His drawings in transparent colour, however, are delightfully fresh and vigorous; luminous in effect, and filled with proofs of keen and genial observation. They seem full of air and light, vivid human interest, and in their treatment of architecture and of all natural features they are at once careful, accurate and lucid without ever showing signs of labour or fatigue. In the abundance of his work and its variety Sandby approached nearer to Turner than any other artist. But he had not Turner’s subtlety of eye and hand, nor his exquisite sense of artistic form. His landscapes are well composed, but on conventional lines, and the whole material is never welded together into an original and impeccable design, as with Turner, Cozens, and Cotman.

Sandby’s Welsh aquatints with their many daring effects of light form the real forerunners of Turner’s “Liber Studiorum.” They display better than any single drawing the width and range of the artist’s powers.

As an engraver and water-colour painter Paul Sandby is a genial and inspiriting personality. He transformed topographical draughtsmanship into something new and living, instinct with life and emotion. “And if we may not call him a great artist, we may at least say that he was a topographical draughtsman of genius.”

ALEXANDER COZENS

[Born in Russia, date unknown; son of Peter the Great and an Englishwoman; sent by his father to study painting in Italy; said to have come to England in 1746; drawing-master at Eton School, 1763-1768; married a sister of Robert Edge Pine; elected Fellow of the Society of Artists, 1765; died in Duke Street, Piccadilly, April 23, 1786.

EXHIBITED: Society of Artists, 1760, ’63, ’65-’71; Free Society, 1761, ’62; Royal Academy, 1772, ’73, ’75, ’77-’79, ’81.

WORKS IN PUBLIC GALLERIES: V. and A. Museum (Water-Colours); British Museum; Manchester Whitworth Institute.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES: Leslie’s “Handbook for Young Painters”; Redgrave’s “Dictionary”; “Reminiscences of Henry Angelo,” vol. i, 212-216; “D. N. B.”

REPRODUCTIONS: THE STUDIO, Feb. 1917; Finberg’s “English Water-Colour Painters.”]

The date when Alexander Cozens came to England is given above as 1746. This is what we find in all the reference books, and it is founded on a memorandum pasted in a book of drawings made by the artist in Italy which is now in the British Museum. This memorandum states that “Alexander Cozens, in London, author of these drawings, lost them, and many more, in Germany, by their dropping from his saddle, when he was riding on his way from Rome to England, in the year 1746. John Cozens, his son, being at Florence in the year 1776, purchased them. When he returned to London in the year 1779 he delivered the drawings to his father.” Now either the date in this note is wrong or, what seems a more probable explanation, Alexander Cozens’s journey to England in 1746 was not the occasion of his first visit to this country, for there is an engraved _View of the Royal College of Eton_, after a drawing made by Cozens, which was published in 1742. It was engraved by John Pine, whose daughter afterwards became Alexander Cozens’s wife. The existence of this engraving, which has been noticed by none of the writers on Cozens’s life, seems to point to the probability that the artist came to England at least four years earlier than has been supposed. It also shows how little we know about Cozens’s early life, and it suggests a certain amount of scepticism about the constantly repeated statements on this subject which rest, apparently, either on dubious authority or on authority which has not or cannot be verified.

Alexander Cozens’s work attracted little attention in modern times until the late Mr. Herbert Home perceived its beauties. Public attention was first drawn to it by the “Historical Collection of British Water-Colours” organized by the Walpole Society in the Loan Exhibition held at the Grafton Galleries at the end of 1911, which included five beautiful drawings by Cozens. This was followed, in 1916, by an exhibition of Mr. Home’s collection of drawings with special reference to the works of Alexander Cozens, held by the Burlington Fine Arts Club. To the catalogue of this exhibition Mr. Laurence Binyon contributed a valuable article on “Alexander Cozens and his Influence on English Painting.” In this article Mr. Binyon does justice to Cozen’s originality of design and to the emotional power of his drawings. “In his freest vein he uses his brush with a loose impetuosity which reminds one curiously of Chinese monochrome sketches--the kind of work beloved by those Chinese artists who valued spontaneous freshness and personal expressiveness above all else in landscape.” “It was indeed,” Mr. Binyon adds, “the naked elements” (of landscape structure) “rather than the superficial aspects of a scene which appealed to his imagination; and in nature it was the solitary and the spacious rather than the agreeably picturesque which evoked his deepest feelings.”

Alexander Cozens used colour sparingly and seldom. His best drawings are either in bistre or in indian ink, and he was fond of working on stained, or perhaps oiled, paper (which was formerly used for tracing). Such paper has doubtless acquired a darker tone with age, and it adds to the “sombreness” of which contemporaries complained in his drawings.

JOHN ROBERT COZENS

[Son of Alexander Cozens, born 1752; made sketching tour in Switzerland and Italy, with R. Payne Knight, 1776-1779; again visited Switzerland and Italy, this time in company with William Beckford, 1782; became insane, 1794; died, it is said, 1799.

EXHIBITED: Society of Artists, 1767-’71; Royal Academy, 1776.

WORKS IN PUBLIC GALLERIES: V. and A. Museum (Water-Colours); British Museum; National Gallery of Ireland; Manchester Whitworth Institute; Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Oldham Art Gallery (Charles E. Lees’ Collection); Manchester Art Gallery (James Blair Bequest).

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES: Edwards’s “Anecdotes”; Leslie’s “Handbook”; Redgrave’s “Century” and “Dictionary”; “D. N. B.”

REPRODUCTIONS: Cosmo Monkhouse’s, Finberg’s, Hughes’s and Rich’s works, already cited; THE STUDIO, Feb. 1917.]

It is really surprising that we know so little about this artist. During his lifetime his works were much sought after, and he must have been personally known to a number of distinguished people; both Payne Knight and the eccentric millionaire, William Beckford, the author of “Vathek,” and owner and rebuilder of Fonthill Abbey, with whom he travelled in Italy and Switzerland, and who both possessed a large number of his drawings, were voluminous writers, yet neither has deigned to tell us anything of interest about the character, personality, or even outward appearance of this very great artist. Both Beckford and Knight wrote accounts of their travels, but one searches them in vain for a single word that would prove that these highly intelligent men had the shadow of a notion that the quiet and unobtrusive young “draughtsman” in their employ was one of the greatest artists their country had produced.

We do not know for certain where or when John Cozens was born nor when he died. Roget says he “appears to have been born abroad when his parent was giving lessons in Bath,” but he gives no authority for the statement, and so far as I know it has not been verified. The best evidence for the date of his birth seems to be Leslie’s statement that he once saw a small pen-drawing on which was written, “Done by J. Cozens, 1761, when nine years of age.” If the date is correct Cozens was only fifteen when he began to exhibit at the Society of Artists. Constable stated that Cozens died in 1796, but most of the authorities give the date as 1799.

That the artist was modest and unobtrusive, like his drawings, we may feel sure. As Leslie wrote, “So modest and unobtrusive are the beauties of his drawings that you might pass them without notice, for the painter himself never says ‘Look at this, or that,’ he trusts implicitly to your own taste and feeling; and his works are full of half-concealed beauties such as Nature herself shows but coyly, and these are often the most fleeting appearances of light. Not that his style is without emphasis, for then it would be insipid, which it never is, nor ever in the least commonplace.”

Constable was one of the first to realize Cozens’s true greatness. “Cozens,” he said, “is all poetry,” and on another occasion he rather shocked Leslie by asserting that Cozens was “the greatest genius that ever touched landscape.” Yet this assertion contains nothing but the plain truth. Genius is the only word we can use to describe the intense concentration of mind and feeling which inspires Cozens’s work. To the analytic eye his drawings are baffling and bewildering in the extreme; it is impossible to find a trace of cleverness or conscious artifice in them. They make you feel that you are looking at the work of a somnambulist or of one who has painted in a trance. They are, I believe, the most incorporeal paintings which have been produced in the Western world, for the paint and the execution seem to count for so little and the personal inspiration for so much. The painter’s genius seems to speak to you direct, and to impress and overawe you without the help of any intermediary.

In this respect Cozens is quite different from Turner. Even when he trusted most implicitly to his genius Turner was always the great artist, the great colourist, the incomparable master of his technique whatever medium he was working in. Beyond the sheer beauty of his simple washes of transparent colour there is hardly a single technical or executive merit in Cozens’s drawings that one can single out for praise or even for notice. Their haunting beauty and incomparable power are spiritual, not material. And as we can think of a spirit too pure and fine to inhabit a gross body like our own, so Cozens seems to be a genius too spiritual for form and colour and the palpable artifices of representation. Certainly no English artist relied more serenely and confidently on his genius, and subdued his art more absolutely to spiritual purposes. And this is what I think Constable meant when he called Cozens “the greatest genius that ever touched landscape”; he did not say that he was the greatest artist.

As one of our illustrations we reproduce the drawing _Lake Albano and Castel Gandolfo_ by Cozens (Plate I) in the collection of Mr. C. Morland Agnew.

THOMAS GIRTIN

[Born in Southwark, 1775; apprenticed to Edward Dayes; first engravings after his drawings published in “Copper Plate Magazine,” 1793; sketching tours, in the Midlands (Lichfield, etc.), 1794, Kent and Sussex 1795, Yorkshire and Scotland 1796, Devonshire 1797, Wales 1798, Yorkshire and Scotland 1799; “Girtin’s Sketching Society” established, 1799; married, 1800; went to Paris, Nov. 1801, and returned to England, May 1802; his _Eidometropolis_, or Great Panorama of London, exhibited at Spring Gardens, August, 1802; died Nov. 9, 1802; engravings of his views of Paris published shortly after his death.

EXHIBITED: Royal Academy, 1794, ’95, ’97-1801.

WORKS IN PUBLIC GALLERIES: V. and A. Museum (Water-Colours); British Museum; National Galleries of Scotland and Ireland; Manchester Whitworth Institute; Ashmolean and Fitzwilliam Museums; Oldham Art Gallery (Charles E. Lees’ Collection).

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES: Edwards’s “Anecdotes”; Dayes’ “Professional Sketches”; Redgrave’s “Century” and “Dictionary”; B.F.A. Club’s Catalogue, 1875; Roget’s “History”; Binyon’s “Life and Works,” 1900; Walpole Society’s Vols. II. and V.

REPRODUCTIONS: Binyon’s “Life”; Monkhouse’s, Finberg’s, Hughes’s, Lytton’s, and Rich’s works already cited; THE STUDIO (Centenary of Thomas Girtin Number), Nov. 1902; THE STUDIO, May 1916; Walpole Society’s Vols. II. and V.]

Compared with John Cozens’s work Girtin’s appears often self-conscious and artificial. His drawings were admired by his contemporaries chiefly on account of their style; references to the “sword-play” of his pencil, the boldness and swiftness of his washes, constantly recur in their eulogies of his work. Girtin was nearly always a stylist, and often a mannerist. But his style, at its best, is so thoroughly in keeping with the spirit of his work that it is difficult to separate the two. His love of the sweeping lines of the open moorland and his passion for height and space appeal irresistibly to our imagination, while the broad simplicity of his vision, his restrained and truthful colour, and his frank, bold, decisive handling seem the only adequate means by which his inspiration could find clear and authoritative expression.

We must remember, too, that Girtin died at the age of twenty-seven. The knowledge of his early and untimely death intensifies our admiration for all he did; while the few supreme masterpieces of poetical landscape he has left us, like the _Plinlimmon_, show clearly what our national art lost by the tragedy of his early death.

Girtin seems to have mastered his art as Robert Louis Stevenson mastered his, by “playing the sedulous ape” to the men he admired. There are now in the British Museum copies he made after Antonio Canal, Piranesi, Hearne, Marlow, and Morland. Of these masters Canal seems to have impressed and taught him most. The spaciousness and breadth of effect of all his topographical work are clearly the outcome of his admiration for Canal’s drawings and paintings. The calligraphic quality of his line work, what has been called the “sword-play” of his pencil, is also due to the same influence.

His earlier drawings, made about 1792 and 1793, were, however, modelled on the style of his master, Edward Dayes. The drawings he made after James Moore’s sketches--of which several have been recently acquired by the Ashmolean Museum--might easily be mistaken for Dayes’ work. They only differ in being more accomplished and workmanlike than those which his master made for the same patron, and in their deliberate avoidance of the dark “repoussoir” of which Dayes was so fond in his foregrounds--an avoidance which gives Girtin’s drawings a greater unity and a more decorative effect than those of Dayes.

By about 1795 Girtin’s real style began to assert itself, in drawings like those of Lichfield and Peterborough Cathedrals. From this time we find him pouring forth an abundance of superb topographical subjects instinct with style and ennobled with poetry and imagination--drawings like _Rievaulx Abbey_ (1798), in the V. and A. Museum, _Carnarvon Castle_, and _The Old Ouse Bridge, York_, both in the possession of his great-grandson, Mr. Thomas Girtin. The noble studies for his Panorama of London (made probably in 1801), his _Lindisfarne_ (?1797) and _Bridgnorth_ (1802), are fortunately in the British Museum. The drawings he made on his return from Paris, during the last sad months of his fast-ebbing life--drawings like the _Porte St. Denis_--are amongst the most superb of his splendid productions.

I will close these brief and inadequate remarks by copying out two advertisements connected with Girtin’s “Panorama” which I believe have not been printed or referred to by any one of the writers on his life and work. The first appeared in “The Times” on August 27, 1802. It runs as follows: “_Eidometropolis_, or Great Panoramic Picture of London, Westminster, and Environs, now exhibiting at the Great Room, Spring Gardens, Admission 1_s._ T. Girtin returns his most grateful thanks to a generous Public for the encouragement given to his Exhibition, and as it has been conceived to be merely a Picture framed, he further begs leave to request of the Public to notice that it is Panoramic, and from its magnitude, which contains 1944 square feet, gives every object the appearance of being the size of nature. The situation is so chosen as to shew to the greatest advantage the Thames, Somerset House, the Temple Gardens, all the Churches, Bridges, principal Buildings, &c., with the surrounding country to the remotest distance, interspersed with a variety of objects characteristic of the great Metropolis. His views of Paris, etched by himself, are in great forwardness, and to be seen with the Picture as above.”