Studio: international art (70.1917)

The Art of Alexander and John Robert Cozens

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“ TOMB OF THE PLANTIAN FAMILY " BY J. R. COZENS (1789)

[In the Collection of Thomas Girlin, Esq.)

mannered pen-drawings. His best work was
done when he observed nature for himself.

The art of his son, John Robert Cozens, is
quite original; there is no trace in it of Claude,
Poussin, or Salvator Rosa, the Dutch landscape
painters, or even Richard Wilson, Gainsborough,
and Paul Sandby. If there is the slightest
likeness to anybody’s work, it is to that of his
father, and then only in method and subject,
certainly not in sentiment or vision. This is
only natural, for being carefully trained by his
parent he became his most illustrious pupil.

What we know of J. R. Cozens’s career we
owe mostly to the account of C. R. Leslie, R.A.,
who, though a ligure-painter, had a most
thorough appreciation of good landscape painting.
Leslie was an intimate friend and the first
biographer of Constable. He possessed a few
works of Girtin and greatly valued them.
But above all he had such an admiration for
J. R. Cozens that he said " there could be no
improvement upon him when at his best.”
Bom in 1752, the younger Cozens seems, like
Girtin, to have worked hard and. developed very
rapidly, for when he was only fifteen years old
he began to exhibit at the Incorporated Society
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of British Artists, and at the age of twenty-four
he was sufficiently skilled as a draughtsman and
water-colourist to go with Robert Payne Knight,
the archaeologist and art collector, to Switzer-
land and Italy to make sketches of the scenery.
His first impressions of the Alps are wonderfully
fresh, and his drawings are peculiarly interesting
as being the first successful attempt at true
representation of Alpine scenery. He seems to
have been quite at home amongst mountains from
the start, and gives the illusion of their height,
bulk, and weight wonderfully well in spite of the
difficulty of scale and proportion in dealing with
large masses. Likewise he shows the valleys,
snow-covered peaks, tree-clad slopes, the solitude
of its lakes, mists, and clouds with great
simplicity of means yet not at all in a common-
place or conventional way. This tour seems to
have lasted from 1776 to 1779, when he returned
to England. In 1782 he visited Italy again,
this time in company with William Beckford,
the famous author of “ Vathek,” for whom he
executed a large number of water-colour
drawings. This second visit apparently occu-
pied about a year and extended over Italy and
Sicilv. Unfortunately the career of this poet-