.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
In the summer of 1805, Cotman spent nearly five weeks in a small area of North Yorkshire, along the banks of the River Greta. This was his third summer in the county, as drawing master-cum-house-guest to the Cholmeley family of Brandsby Hall, near York. They made a habit of introducing the rising young artist to neighbouring landowners whose estates might offer him appealing subjects of mature woodland, ancient statuary or gothic ruin. Yet once he had begun to explore the park at Rokeby, and its surroundings at the junction of the Greta with the River Tees, Cotman was reluctant to leave.
The character of the landscape which captivated Cotman had no less an impact on Sir Walter Scott, who visited in 1809, and in his poem Rokeby, published in 1812, created a quintessentially Romantic concatenation of dramatic setting and historical fantasy. For Scott, this spot united 'the richness and luxuriance of English vegetation with the romantic variety of glen, torrent and copse which dignifies our northern scenery'. Cotman’s famous Greta Bridge may be his most famous response to this location, but to the artist, it was an emblem of restraint and sobriety in a landscape which offered many other delights (fig. 1).
John Morritt, Rokeby’s owner, created paths along the river which immersed the visitor in a towering mass of vegetation, and this experience is captured in Greta Woods. The bridge drawing the eye up to the skyline has a similar profile to the Dairy Bridge on the estate, but according to the latest research by David Hill, its location does not match the setting in which Cotman places it here. Cotman reported he had devoted himself to both drawing and colouring from nature during this campaign, but the extent to which these activities were continuous or separate remains a matter of debate. As a group, the Greta watercolours show Cotman grappling with the same technical and conceptual issues of authenticity versus finish and originality versus convention, that preoccupied Turner and Constable, not to mention a host of lesser artists, at precisely this period.
The working compromise these two giants managed to negotiate through their work secured their fame, but both the one and the other eluded Cotman. His own intriguing blend of naturalism and sophistication, seems to have proceded in stages from an on-the-spot sketch to a refined, abstracted outline which may then have been taken back to the spot to be tinted, rekindled by a concentration on colour and tone, rather than shape. The woods skirting the estate, which occupied Cotman for his final two weeks, may have been, in his words, ‘a delicious spot’ but that made him even more aware of the need to ‘draw it over in a high style’.
Cotman held on to most of this remarkable sequence, converting no more than a handful into exhibited or commissioned watercolours, but twenty years later was persuaded to part with three of the studies by Francis Gibson, a banker from Saffron Walden in Essex. Two of these ultimately made their way into the collections of the Yale Center for British Art (In Rokeby Park; fig. 2) and the Cecil Higgins Museum, Bedford; the third and final sheet is offered here. Along with others, now in the British Museum, Tate, and the museums in Norwich and Leeds, they form what the poet and curator Laurence Binyon celebrated as ‘The most perfect examples of pure watercolour ever painted in Europe’.
We are grateful to Timothy Wilcox for preparing this catalogue entry.
The character of the landscape which captivated Cotman had no less an impact on Sir Walter Scott, who visited in 1809, and in his poem Rokeby, published in 1812, created a quintessentially Romantic concatenation of dramatic setting and historical fantasy. For Scott, this spot united 'the richness and luxuriance of English vegetation with the romantic variety of glen, torrent and copse which dignifies our northern scenery'. Cotman’s famous Greta Bridge may be his most famous response to this location, but to the artist, it was an emblem of restraint and sobriety in a landscape which offered many other delights (fig. 1).
John Morritt, Rokeby’s owner, created paths along the river which immersed the visitor in a towering mass of vegetation, and this experience is captured in Greta Woods. The bridge drawing the eye up to the skyline has a similar profile to the Dairy Bridge on the estate, but according to the latest research by David Hill, its location does not match the setting in which Cotman places it here. Cotman reported he had devoted himself to both drawing and colouring from nature during this campaign, but the extent to which these activities were continuous or separate remains a matter of debate. As a group, the Greta watercolours show Cotman grappling with the same technical and conceptual issues of authenticity versus finish and originality versus convention, that preoccupied Turner and Constable, not to mention a host of lesser artists, at precisely this period.
The working compromise these two giants managed to negotiate through their work secured their fame, but both the one and the other eluded Cotman. His own intriguing blend of naturalism and sophistication, seems to have proceded in stages from an on-the-spot sketch to a refined, abstracted outline which may then have been taken back to the spot to be tinted, rekindled by a concentration on colour and tone, rather than shape. The woods skirting the estate, which occupied Cotman for his final two weeks, may have been, in his words, ‘a delicious spot’ but that made him even more aware of the need to ‘draw it over in a high style’.
Cotman held on to most of this remarkable sequence, converting no more than a handful into exhibited or commissioned watercolours, but twenty years later was persuaded to part with three of the studies by Francis Gibson, a banker from Saffron Walden in Essex. Two of these ultimately made their way into the collections of the Yale Center for British Art (In Rokeby Park; fig. 2) and the Cecil Higgins Museum, Bedford; the third and final sheet is offered here. Along with others, now in the British Museum, Tate, and the museums in Norwich and Leeds, they form what the poet and curator Laurence Binyon celebrated as ‘The most perfect examples of pure watercolour ever painted in Europe’.
We are grateful to Timothy Wilcox for preparing this catalogue entry.