Volume 53, Number 14 · September 21, 2006
The Neglected Master
By Sanford Schwartz
Cotman in the North: Watercolours of Durham and Yorkshire
by David Hill
Yale University Press, 185 pp., $65.00
BOOKS DRAWN ON FOR THIS REVIEW
The Life of John Sell Cotman
by Sydney D. Kitson
London: Faber and Faber (1937; out of print)
John Sell Cotman, 1782–1842
edited by Miklos Rajnai
Cornell University Press (1982; out of print)
Romantic Landscape: The Norwich School of Painters
by David Blayney Brown, Andrew Hemingway, and Anne Lyles
London: Tate Gallery (2000; out of print)
Written to coincide with two related exhibitions held last year in England, Cotman in the North is a very welcome, if not entirely first-rate, addition to the slowly growing body of writing on one of the most inventive and accomplished of all English artists. David Hill's study describes a number of months during the summers and autumns of 1803, 1804, and 1805 when John Sell Cotman, then in his early twenties and already noticed in London as one of the bright hopes of English watercolor art, went on sketching tours to Yorkshire and Durham, in the northeast corner of the country. Carrying a letter of introduction to Francis and Teresa Ann Cholmeley, of Brandsby Hall, a house near York, the young artist was received initially as a visiting sketcher, and was soon giving various Cholmeleys (and their guests) drawing lessons, being introduced to other families in the region, and going off on excursions to one site or social function after another with this or that member of the household. By the time he left Yorkshire for good, in November 1805, he was thought about as a true member of the family.
Review, 3280 words
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