Part 1

A TREATISE ON LANDSCAPE PAINTING IN WATER COLOURS BY DAVID COX

WITH A FOREWORD BY A. L. BALDRY

EDITED BY GEOFFREY HOLME LONDON: THE STUDIO, LTD., 44 LEICESTER SQ., W.C. 2 MCMXXII

FOREWORD BY A. L. BALDRY

When an artist is beyond question a master of his craft it is always particularly interesting to hear what he has to say about the principles by which his art is controlled and the methods he employs in his practice. It is, of course, in his work, in the things he creates, that he gives the complete expression of his convictions and that the full product of his experience is embodied, but by the aid of words he is able not only to declare the intention by which his expression has been directed but also to explain the technical processes which have enabled him to arrive at his results. His creed, once set down in writing, is made permanently available for the guidance of all who study his work and seek to realise his purpose; the statement of his methods becomes an enduring record to which those who come after him can refer when they wish to understand the manner of his production.

In this way, indeed, the educational value of the master’s precepts is maintained indefinitely. Even after his personal and living influence has been withdrawn his authority persists and his teaching remains active, because in all its essentials it is still within the student’s reach. Fashions in art may vary from time to time, but its fundamental principles do not change and the exposition of these principles which has served one generation is just as helpful to another.

Therefore, such a book as this “Treatise on Landscape Painting and Effect in Water Colours, from the first rudiments to the finished picture,” by David Cox, deserves as ready an acceptance to-day as it received when it was first published more than a century ago. David Cox is justly counted among the greater British masters--that can scarcely be disputed--he was also a teacher of very wide experience and he knew well how to enable others to profit by the knowledge he had accumulated. It was the fruit of this experience that he gathered in his “Treatise,” and it was in response to a demand from the people who were best able to judge the quality of his teaching that he undertook the preparation of the book. “The urgent and repeated solicitations of many of his pupils,” he says in his foreword, “have induced the author of this work to submit to the public those results which are the result of many years’ study, and which may guide the student in the selection of appropriate effects of nature, adapted to the different characters of landscape composition.”

That in referring to “urgent and repeated solicitations” he was not using a mere figure of speech is likely enough, for in those days plenty of people wanted to be taught and the master who knew his business was very much in request. Drawing and water-colour painting were reckoned as elegant accomplishments which formed a necessary part of a polite education, and there was not only a host of amateurs who were ready to learn but a number of professional students as well with a real desire to become proficient in a new and attractive form of practice in which art patrons and collectors were showing themselves to be much interested. The official type of art school with which we are familiar to-day was almost non-existent--or at all events there were few such places available for the amateur--so the private teacher had to supply the deficiency and to assume a position of considerable responsibility. However, it cannot be disputed that he filled this position in a way that brought him credit and that what he had to do was done with marked efficiency.

Certainly, the students then had privileges which we to-day can justly envy. They were extraordinarily fortunate in their teachers, for they were able to obtain instruction from some of the greatest masters whom this country has produced. Turner, De Wint, Cotman and David Cox, and many other men of distinction who were their contemporaries were actively engaged in teaching during some part of their lives and by their genius and experience they raised greatly the standard of popular taste and fostered a feeling for art in social circles. Moreover, by their practice and precept they developed the new art of painting in water colours from a tentative and timid form of expression into something splendidly robust and full of brilliant possibilities.

It may, perhaps, seem a matter for regret that an artist of rare capacities, like David Cox, should have apparently wasted in the drudgery of teaching so much of the time which he might have employed to advantage in following his profession as a painter. But by his work as a drawing-master he not only created a public which learned eventually to show an effective appreciation of his productions, but he also helped on a movement which was of benefit to others as well as himself. If the art in which he excelled had been taught only by the less competent men it would scarcely have secured so quickly such a large measure of recognition; it was the ability of the teachers to prove how great were its possibilities that ensured its acceptance and established its authority.

Still, it must be admitted that many of these men whom we now rank as masters became teachers from necessity rather than choice. At the end of the eighteenth century it was often difficult for a young artist to earn a living; pictures fetched low prices and the demand for them was uncertain, so he had to seek out other sources of income. Teaching, badly paid as it was, was a very real help and the man who could secure a good connection in schools and among private pupils was able to maintain himself while he was waiting to find buyers for his works. If the patrons failed to appear he remained a teacher to the end of his days, counting himself fortunate if he was able to hold his own against the competition of younger men who were ready to oust him from his place.

David Cox was decidedly one of those who were forced into teaching by circumstances, for he was born of humble parents and had from early life to make his way in the world by his own exertions. He had during his childhood some small amount of art training and when he was barely seventeen he began to work as a scene-painter, first in Birmingham, where he was born, and afterwards in London. But even then he was a serious student of nature with ambitions to become a landscape painter, and soon after he came to London he took the opportunity to get some lessons from John Varley in water-colour painting. In this new art he made such satisfactory progress that he gave up his theatrical work, devoting himself, instead, to landscape painting and teaching. Even then he was only twenty-two and he had still much to learn to fit himself for the career on which he was entering; but so assiduous was he in his study of nature and so consistent in his effort to acquire a full command of technical processes that he was able at the age of thirty--in 1813--to secure election as a member of the Society of Painters in Water Colours. This election can be taken as evidence that he was already regarded by his fellow-artists as a man of some distinction in his profession. But the same year brought other evidences of his growing success, for it saw his appointment as drawing-master in the Military Academy at Farnham, and also the issue of the first parts of his “Treatise on Landscape Painting,” in which he was able to talk about the “repeated solicitations” of his pupils and to imply that his position as a teacher was one which justified him in speaking with authority about matters of technical practice.

Yet, with what he might regard as a fairly established place in the world he was by no means relieved from his struggles for existence. He had advanced, it is true, beyond the stage when he was glad to get a couple of guineas a dozen for the drawings which he sold to dealers, but his smaller works still fetched only a few shillings and a large one not more than five or six pounds. It was necessary for him to work very hard and to practise the strictest economy to maintain himself and his wife and child, and it was impossible for him to do without the earnings which teaching brought him. It was probably for this reason that in 1814, when he gave up his post at the Military Academy because he felt the work there to be unsuited to him, he left London and settled in Hereford, where teaching engagements in schools and private families were plentiful and where he was able to take in pupil-boarders.

At Hereford he remained for nearly fourteen years, but he visited London annually and he made periodical sketching excursions to different parts of the British Isles and occasionally abroad. Eventually he returned to London and lived at Kennington until 1841, when he moved once again, this time to Harbourne, a suburb of his native town, Birmingham, where he died in 1859. Slowly but surely he built up his reputation, more slowly still he increased his income and added to his savings, but it was not until his final departure from London that he was able to free himself from his responsibilities as a teacher and to devote the whole of his energies to painting.

Indeed, the move to Harbourne was made partly to obtain leisure for practice in oil painting, as he had conceived a somewhat sudden desire to acquire a mastery of that medium. He had used oils many years before, but for sketches rather than finished pictures; the ambition to achieve more in this direction came to him about 1839, when he made the acquaintance of W. J. Muller and watched that extraordinarily skillful painter at work. Cox, who was then a man of fifty-six, became a sort of pupil of the younger artist and accepted hints from him with characteristic humility--he is reported to have said on one occasion during a technical demonstration, “You see, Mr. Muller, I can’t paint.”

However, if such a remark were justifiable in 1839, it was certainly subject to considerable modification very few years later, for Cox, once started in the right direction, developed quickly into an oil painter of unquestionable distinction. He never, perhaps, reached quite the same degree of proficiency which he had attained in water colours, but he did work which was worthy of him and he added many fine canvases to the series which generation by generation has been built up by the masters of British landscape. Fortunately, he did not devote the whole of his time to pursuit of new methods, indeed, to this final period of his life belong some of the greatest of his water-colour paintings--possibly practice with oils heightened his keenness of vision and increased the strength with which he handled the more delicate medium, and no doubt freedom from distractions enabled him to work more deliberately and with closer concentration.

If Cox’s career is judged by the conventional money standard it would be scarcely possible to say that he achieved success, for at no time were his earnings large--he is said to have only once received £100 for a picture--and the small competence which he amassed in his later years would have seemed merely poverty to anyone less modest and simple-minded. But if he is measured by the true standard, of accomplishment, he can be reckoned as successful in the highest degree. His paintings are distinguished by an exquisite perception of the great facts of nature and by a consistent significance of interpretation, they have a most attractive individuality, and their technical mastery is exceptionally convincing--they put him definitely among the leaders of the British school. As a teacher he had a wide and wholesome influence because he sought to impress upon his pupils his own sincere belief that nature is and always must be the right source of an artist’s inspiration, and because he tried to make them devout and serious students like himself.

It was essentially from the standpoint of the landscape painter that he approached his teaching. His “Treatise” was intended to guide the student “in the selection of appropriate effects of nature,” or in other words, to point the way to a proper understanding of nature’s subtleties. Cox did not believe in an easy and convenient formula; he did not use one himself and he had no wish to impose it upon others. In this his attitude was partly temperamental and partly, no doubt, due to the fact that, unlike many of his contemporaries, he did not spend his earlier years in learning the conventions of the topographical draughtsman--he was a translator and an interpreter, not merely a copyist, and although his interpretation was eminently a true one, its truth appeared in his realisation of the great fundamentals, not in the laborious statement of local trivialities. He expressed this himself on one occasion when the committee of the Water-Colour Society had complained that some paintings of his were “too rough”--he wrote, “They forget that these are the work of the mind, which I consider very far before portraits of places.”

This faith that painting should be the work of the mind, and of a mind so stored with impressions of nature that it would be able infallibly to recognise what was the way in which each aspect of nature should be treated, is very clearly demonstrated in his “Treatise.” Read between the lines of its practical advice the book, indeed, is an eloquent assertion of a master’s creed, and as such it is instructive not only to the student who wishes to profit by its technical hints but also to the judges of art who are anxious to appreciate the principles of which David Cox and his greater contemporaries were masterly exponents.

There is much in the text that explains these principles and defines the manner in which they should be applied. For instance, when Cox dwells upon “the necessity of becoming thoroughly acquainted with, and of obtaining a proper feeling of, the subject,” and when he says that “the picture should be complete and perfect in the mind before it is even traced upon the canvas,” he is simply advocating that first and most vital essential in all artistic effort, accurate and intelligent observation.

Again, when he insists that “in the selection of a subject from nature the student should ever keep in view the principal object which induced him to make the sketch,” and adds that “the prominence of this leading feature in the piece should be duly supported throughout; the character of the picture should be derived from it; every other subject introduced should be subservient to it; and the attraction of the one should be the attraction of the whole,” he is only pointing out the necessity for orderly and logical design. His arguments, too, that the sentiment of the subject should be reflected in the manner of its treatment, that “such force and expression should be displayed as would render the effect, at the first glance, intelligible to the observer,” and that the right relation should be scrupulously maintained between the leading object in the composition and the less prominent accessories, are wholly inspired by the belief that a sense of balance and proportion are as indispensable to the student as the power to see and to think about what he sees.

Further, what he has to say about the need for exactness in the preparatory stages of a painting is most significant, as it shows how much importance he attached to systematic accomplishment and steady progression from one stage of the work to another. But here also the foundation must be observation--the student “must possess a clear conception of his subject” because upon that depends the perfection of his outline, and “it will be necessary for him to be particular in his designation of the outline” because only in that way will he be able to proceed to his own satisfaction and convey a definite and correct idea to the observer. Cox very rightly claims that “he who devotes his time to the completion of a perfect outline, when he has gained this point, has more than half finished his piece: while the author of a slovenly outline creates for himself an infinity of trouble, in order to avoid additional errors in the colouring of his subjects: and after all his efforts, finds it impossible to produce a picture perfect in any one part,” and he adds some valuable suggestions as to the way in which this perfect outline--by which he means simply certainty and expressiveness of draughtsmanship--should be obtained. Always, however, he asserts that the way to success lies only through persistent endeavour and unfailing consistency of purpose--“if the mind be fixed and sincere in pursuit of the art, difficulties will be easily surmountable: they will rather quicken than damp the desire for improvement,” and “the accomplishment of one task will only give additional stimulus for the performance of another” are essential articles in the creed which he professed and practised throughout his life.

In fact, he regarded art as the intellectual result of a visual exercise and to obtain this result he prescribed a rigorous discipline. His teaching is all the more worthy of attention now because it provides an antidote to the sloppy conventionalism which is poisoning much of the art of to-day. There were no affectations about David Cox, and the poses of our modern artists of the “advanced” school would have seemed to him particularly offensive. Yet, he was himself a pioneer, and in some ways a rebel; but in breaking new ground he was seeking to make progress by overcoming the difficulties of art and his rebellion was against limitations which he knew to be unreasonable. His book is proof enough that he would have had no sympathy with reactionaries who make a pretence of primitive simplicity so that they can shirk the labour of learning their craft; and all that he has included in it shows that to him that art only was right which was earnest, sincere, and honest, and unquestioning in its worship of nature.

A TREATISE ON LANDSCAPE PAINTING and EFFECT IN WATER COLOURS: FROM THE FIRST RUDIMENTS, TO THE FINISHED PICTURE.

WITH EXAMPLES IN _Outline, Effect, and Colouring_.

BY DAVID COX.

LONDON: PRINTED FOR AND PUBLISHED BY S. AND J. FULLER, _at the Temple of Fancy_, RATHBONE PLACE; And sold by Messrs. LONGMAN, HURST, BEES, ORME, and BROWN; HERWOOD, NEELY, and JONES; and GALE and CURTIS, Paternoster-Row, ACKERMANN, Strand, and by all Booksellers in Town and Country.

1813.

PRICE 7_s._ 6_d._

Facsimile of the cover of the original edition, published in 1813

TO THE PUBLIC[A]

In an age when the patronage extended to the Fine Arts bears a full proportion to the growing expansion of the human mind, and when our National Taste is no longer put out to nurse, an apology for the publication of a new Work, tending to the still more complete elucidation of principles not yet perfectly understood, and giving greater facilities to the labours of the young Artist, will scarcely be considered necessary. If an excuse were sought for, however, the Publishers would confidently point to the acknowledged eminence of the Author of the production which they have the honour to propose to the notice of the world; to the new and interesting principles which it will develope; and to the extent and excellence of the examples with which it will abound. To an enlightened and liberal public, possessing ability to discriminate, and spirit to reward talent, it is unnecessary to urge any additional claims to their attention and support.

The abilities of MR. COX, as a Painter in Water Colours, have been long established; and his knowledge of Effect is equal to that of any Artist of which the age can boast. His Pencil Drawings are of the boldest style; and the Etchings, in imitation of Lead Pencil and Chalk, which will be found amongst the examples appended to this Work, will be marked by a peculiar character of fidelity, and derive an additional value from the circumstance of their being executed by himself.--In the first of these Sketches, the most simple principles of the Art will be exposed; and the advancement of the young Student will be accomplished by their gradual progression to subjects more interesting in their detail, and of greater difficulty in their execution.

In the progress of the Work, the Author will introduce a variety of imitations of his Drawings, in Sepia and Colours, from all the most striking Effects in Nature; the Plates from which will be executed by the first Aquatinta Engraver in London; and the subjects appropriated to this department of the Work will be so selected, as to display an unusual variety of the most picturesque Scenes in England and Wales.

The diversity and character of these Examples, combined with the sound and simple instruction which will be found in these Numbers, will render it a most desirable object of study, not only to the fashionable Amateur, but to the young Artist whose disposition and ambition urge him on in pursuit of professional eminence. All speculative and uncertain theories will be cast aside, to make room for tried rules and solid principles; the object of the whole being gradually to conduct the Student, by the most direct paths, to the highest point of practical excellence: and the Proprietors feel the most confident anticipations of the brilliant success which will crown this Undertaking, from the consciousness that a Work, better qualified to establish those ends which it professes to keep in view, is not to be found amongst the productions of contemporary genius.

A TREATISE ON LANDSCAPE PAINTING AND EFFECT IN WATER COLOURS BY DAVID COX[B]

ADVERTISEMENT.

The urgent and repeated solicitations of many of his Pupils have induced the author of this Work to submit to the Public those remarks which are the result of many years’ study, and which may guide the Student in the selection of appropriate effects of Nature, adapted to the different characters of Landscape composition.

In his choice of the examples to elucidate these Observations, he has been guided by a wish to lay before the Learner, as far as the limits of the Work would admit of such illustrations, some of the most striking effects, where incident combines with Nature to give expression and vigour to each scene. A more satisfactory elucidation of this rule will be afforded in the examples appended to the subsequent pages.

GENERAL OBSERVATIONS ON LANDSCAPE PAINTING.