Exhibition curator Timothy Wilcox reflects on the pre-eminent English watercolourist and draughtsman of architecture – and on the impact of Normandy on his work.
Laurence Binyon, poet, curator and author of the first book on John Sell Cotman, wrote that the artist was ‘unrivalled as a draughtsman of architecture’. He was echoing an opinion expressed in Cotman’s own lifetime, by the critic of Ackermann’s Repository, who wrote in 1826: ‘He is the first architectural draughtsman in England,’ adding ‘I say not this myself but have high authority for my assertion.’
John Sell Cotman, Saint George de Bocherville
Since the reawakening of interest in Cotman around the turn of the 20th century, brought about largely by the publication of Binyon’s book in 1897 and his acquisition of hundreds of Cotman watercolours and drawings for the British Museum in 1902, it is for his landscapes that Cotman has been most admired. His uncluttered sense of design, supported by a strong, clear handling of colour made him the pre-eminent English watercolourist, revered by collectors and connoisseurs and emulated by amateurs who bought ‘Cotman’ paper and ‘Cotman’ watercolour boxes to aid their own efforts. Cotman’s drawings, and his hundreds of etchings, suffered by comparison.
‘Normandy, its places and its people, exercised a powerful hold on Cotman’s imagination’
John Sell Cotman, Alençon
Prints were – and remain – one of the best ways of distributing an artist’s work and Cotman was no exception in seeing them as the foundation of his public reputation. Having devoted five years to scouring his home county of Norfolk for suitable material, what better opportunity could there be with the reopening of Europe after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, than for Cotman to continue his architectural explorations in France? Fortunately, Cotman’s employer, the Great Yarmouth banker and all-round amateur scholar Dawson Turner, had good connections there, men whose passion for their own history had only been sharpened by the many upheavals – not to mention countless demolitions of historic buildings – of the revolutionary period.
Despite the fact – or was it because of it? – that in recent years Gothic architecture had been a topic of intense rivalry between the English and the French, with both claiming to be its originator, Cotman wanted to concentrate on the earlier, round-arched Norman style; this was familiar to him from Norwich Cathedral, and from Durham, which he had drawn in 1805, and there was a definite desire to stress what the two nations might have in common, after more than 20 years of armed conflict.
John Sell Cotman, A Ruined House
EXPEDITIONS TO FRANCE
Thus it was that Cotman set out for France in the summer of 1817. His journey lasted 7 weeks and took him from Dieppe, in the far north-east of Normandy, to Mont St Michel in the west. The following year he returned for an even longer trip of 11 weeks. After the eviction of the monks, Mont St Michel was turned into a prison; visitors to the area were treated with suspicion, as Cotman shows in his spectacular watercolour of the site.
The great Abbaye aux Dames in Caen, founded by William the Conqueror’s wife, Queen Matilda, had been carved up, part given over to an army store, the rest to a workhouse. Fortunately for Cotman, its superintendant turned out to be a local aristocrat with an interest in antiquities, who took Cotman on a tour of some of the surrounding churches. Cotman’s skill and efficiency in sketching all the buildings he came across was greatly admired by the French. Charles de Gerville, an émigré who had spent several years in England before returning to his family estates south of Cherbourg, accompanied Cotman on a fortnight’s tour of the region, and tempted him back with promises of many more discoveries for a final excursion in 1820.
The simple, bold forms of many of these great Norman churches evidently appealed to Cotman. Yet the 97 etchings he made for the two volumes of The Architectural Antiquities of Normandy seem to have been too stark, too primitive, in a way, for most people’s taste. Despite all his efforts, the publication was not a success. Nothing daunted, he took up his sketches as the basis for a host of watercolour paintings. The best of these, such as Alençon, unite Cotman’s unmistakeable clarity of conception with reminiscences of the passing delights of French street life. Presented in the exhibition alongside views of the same places by his contemporaries, J M W Turner, Bonington, Prout, and many others, Cotman appears anything but disenchanted. Normandy, its places and its people continued to exercise a powerful hold on his imagination.
Cotman in Normandy promises to be much more than a simple exhibition of English watercolours. It invites us to reconsider the inspiration Cotman gained from the complexities and uncertainties of both past and present, alongside his sheer delight in the woods, waterfalls, and beaches which provide such a vivid memorial to his tours. At a time when Britain’s place in Europe is again the subject of open debate, the experiences of one intrepid romantic traveller command our attention in more ways than one.
‘Normandy, its places and its people, exercised a powerful hold on Cotman’s imagination’
John Sell Cotman, View of Granville
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john sell cotman is my great,great,great,great grandad(my grandma’s husbands grandad)