JOHN SELL COTMAN
BOOKS OF THE DAY
By BASIL GRAY
WHEN Cotman died in 1842 at the age of sixty of "natural decay,"-his only life-long friend and patron, Dawson Turner, considered writing a memoir of him as he had done for, Crome. But he desisted, Mr. Kitson conjectures, out of regard for the feelings of Cotman's family; he had too close a perception of the roots of his tragic ending in the life-long refusal of the artist to "face facts" and his consequent alternation between intense excitement and gloomy, despair of ever-increasing ilepth and duration. It is with the material that was in Dawson Turner's hands; letters covering a period of thirty- eight years, that Mr. Kitson has now written the Life of John Sell Cotman. The personal recollections of Dawson Turner are lost for ever, but no life written before Cotman's work fell into, its true perspective could give a fair Or reasonable
view of his character, ambitions and struggles. .
It is now forty years since Mr. Laurence Binyon's study of Cotman appeared in The Portfolio, and thirty-five years since the large collection of drawings from the Reeve collection was acquired by the British Museum. It is _hard for us to uncle:- stand how Cotman needed to be rediscovered : his vision comes so naturally to us, and the quality of his washes give us such simple, direct pleasure. We seek rather for an explanation of his neglect during his life-time and of the forces that led the master of broad effects to spend years of his life making detailed architectural drawings of Romanesque and Gothic buildings and careful etchings of brasses in Norfolk churches. It has long been known that Cotman's most fruitful period of fine work was between about 1805 and 1815, from about his twenty-third to his thirty-third year. This was the time of Greta Bridge and the other Yorkshire subjects, painted in washes of exquisitely fresh and gay colour which owe their brilliance to their transparency. Mr. Kitson, who has made a close study of the chronology of his work, as it can be checked by external evidence of subject as well as by style, has been led to conclusions which shorten still further this early period and concentrate still more fine work in it. Thus the well-known drawing "Breaking the Clod" is put as early as 1807, and the "Waterfall," of which both the water-colour and the oil painting are in the Colman collection, as 1808 instead of i816 and 1815 as hitherto ; and the soft-ground etchings, several of which have a similar lyrical quality, are given to the years i805 to 1815 instead of 1820 to 1830; Mr. Kitson has used the exact chronology of the paintings as a frame- work for Cotman's life, which is the subject of his book. --The life is not one of much external incident, and its stuff is the effect of the general and more particular circumstances on the psychology, and so on the work, of the artist. In such- an account of a life's history equal emphasis must be _given to .all beriods, whether they be fruitful or not in our eyes. Yet such a balanced treatment enables Mr. Kitson to show Inw at intervals throughout his life Cotman was carried away, left his architectural studies, and produced works entirely transcending the general level of this period, or, at a later stage, was roused from the melancholy of the life in the "family manufactory " of drawing copies.
It is a tragic story, not so much for the lack of recognition and worldly success that Cotman met with as -for the lack of independence and self-confidence in his own character, -that led him so often to take decisions fatal to the steady develop- ment of his art. The capacity for hard work and his diligence, combined with his superb eye for colour and inspiration_ in design, might have carried him very far. But there were morbid strains in his nature. The son of a Norwich hair-
The Life of John Sell Cotman. By Stiney D. Kitson.„ (Faber
- and Faber. 25s.)' - dresser, he seems to have been abnormally sensitive and over- insistent on being treated socially as an equal, and as an artist as beyond Criticism, in the county society into:which he was readily accepted as a young man- for his attractive appearance and address as well as for his talent as an artist. This- would pass unnoticed if it were not for the evidence of his later.life. At seventeen he had gone to London to find recognition and a name as a painter. He had the great good fortune of working in Dr. Munro's house just after Ghtin and Turner had left it. In his twenty-first. year; he was already as successor to Girtin, who had died in 1802, the leading member 'of the Sketching Club,-and an exhibitor at the Royal Academy. The Yorkshire scenery so fired his imagination that he was taken out of himself. and, perhaps unconsciously, forced to invent a new convention of representation instead of- the . tradition of the topographers-modified by Girtinowhich he-had inherited. The excitement set up by his success and the rapid maturity of his painting style must have been intense. When he failed to find a whole-hearted patron or ready purchasers for any of his work, Cotman determined in 1806 to withdraw from London to his native _town.
At Norwich Cotman was even more disappointed than in London, and it was no doubt to conceal this from himself as much as for the economic necessity which his marriage in 1809 , put upon him, that Cotman threw himself so enthusiastically into Dawson Turner's plans for collecting material for a history of Norman and 'Saxon architecture. This eventually took him to live at Yarmouth from 1812 to 1824, and to make three visits to Normandy. During these years Cotman acted as drawing master to Turner's four daughters, and the demands of the whole family on- i3 time reduced the time he could give to his painting to almost nothing, while he failed to pin the financial independence that he hoped for. It is a strange thing for an ambitious man to have been content with during the prime of his life. No doubt society was to blame for not having discerned Cotman's genius and given him her patronage. But Cotman was enthusiastic for his antiquarian work ; he was too proud to live as simply as Blake. He also had, seven children, of whom five survived—of these two were mentally unstable. Ought society to have provided for them ?
Such are the problems of Cotman's life. After the first withdrawal from London his whole life seems to have been an effort to escape. Yet no artist has had a more direct approach to his subject, -and he was evidently an extremely sociable, even gay, man. Shut up with his family, in which his mental instability s appeared in accentuated degree, he was at his worst,- at his best when on a sketching tour. Natural phenomena, especially the grand and awe-inspiring, satisfied him best : they carried him out of himself and released all morbid -repressions.
Mr. Kitson's book is of some length, and besides the 157 paintings and drawings reproduced, at least as many are. men- tioned in the text, but never does it become like a catalogue, nor does the interest require to be fed, as sometimes in "art books" which avoid aesthetics by the introduction of irrelevant matter connected with-the subjects treated. Indeed, our only criticism would be to ask for more—more particularly of Cotman's letters, and some hint from the author of his judgement of Cotman's character. He keeps himself so discreetly in the background, that unconsciously one identifies his view of the artist's character with that of Dawson Turner. The volume is easy to read and- furnished with two indexes. We would sometimes be glad to sacrifice one of two subjects or a plate in order to have the other larger, and even the appearance of the book to the greater faithfulness of half-tone reproduction to collotype, especially of the drawings.
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