John Sell Cotman 1822

John Sell Cotman (1782-1842) was one of the finest English artists of the Romantic era. The son of a Norwich barber turned draper, Cotman taught himself drawing as a boy, moved to London in 1798 "to learn to be a painter" at age 16, found employment coloring aquatints for Rudolph Ackermann, then joined in 1799 the informal "academy" run by Dr. Thomas Munro. He exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1800, the year of his first sketching trip to Wales, and may have sketched with Thomas Girtin at Conwy, on the Wales north coast. In 1801 he joined the Sketching Club started by Thomas Girtin (who was then in Paris), and made his living selling drawings for use as amateur sketching patterns. In 1803-1805 he spent his summers in Yorkshire, at the home of his patron Francis Cholmeley (1783-1854) and the art collector Walter Fawkes. Cotman moved back to Norwich in 1806, joined the Norwich Society of painters, and made his living as a drawing master. During 1812-23 Cotman was based in Yarmouth, near his lifelong patron Dawson Turner (1775-1858); with Turner's support Cotman travelled throughout southwest England and Normandy, producing a large number of superb architectural watercolors and etchings. Cotman moved to London and was elected to the Old Water-Colour Society in 1825, and in 1834 became Professor of Drawing at King's College, London.

Cotman's early paintings (before 1804) are notable for their dark and stormy romanticism. Some of this adopts the picturesque style of the Norwich painter John Crome (1768-1824), and some of it clearly borrows from the atmospheric style of Thomas Girtin.

Around 1804 Cotman's style went through a complete transformation toward greater light and serene planes of transparent color. Why this change occured is unknown, but it may have been stimulated by the influence of John Varley during 1801-04, when both attended the London Sketching Club, and (I suspect) exposure to the late Italian drawings of Francis Towne, who lived in London from 1800.

Cotman's marriage in 1809 induced him to return to Norwich to pursue his career as drawing master. Around this time he also significantly modified his "Greta" style, probably to make his paintings more popular with art collectors. And he burdened himself further (at the request of the banker and amateur antiquarian Dawson Turner) by making hundreds of architectural drawings and etchings of ruins and villages in Norfolk and Suffolk, transforming the best of these drawings into etchings (shown at right). Dawson Turner later sent Cotman to Normandy in 1817, 1818 and 1820 to make more architectural drawings. He clearly loved the Normand countryside and made many fine paintings of the area; in these he imitates the prismatic palette and dominant orange hues of Joseph Turner's middle style, and imitates the topographical artist Samuel Prout in the placement of figures. The etchings proved to be an enormous labor, and he began to suffer from severe depression. He moved back to Norwich to teach, but was hounded by creditors.

Despite his enormous talent and compositional skill, Cotman struggled throughout later years with family responsibilities, the tedious burdens of drawing master, and symptoms of depression. Around 1830 he changed his painting style again, to much darker and more massively composed imaginary landscapes, painted on small sheets with a watercolor medium made with rice paste that imitated the thick texture of oil paints. But Cotman died in obscurity (Ruskin and Turner never mention him), and an appreciation of his works did not begin until the late Victorian era. Since then, however, his stature as a watercolourist and etcher has only increased.