When John Robert Cozens returned to England after his Italian travels late in 1783, he began work on a remarkable series of more than ninety deeply poetic watercolor views of Switzerland and Italy for William Beckford, of which the romantic sunset View of Vietri and Raito, Italy (see cat. 16) is a stunning example. Beckford was a demanding patron, and the watercolors in this large group were probably produced fairly quickly. They have a uniformity of deep tones and evocative atmospheric effects, depicting Italian blue skies and vivid sunsets, storms, and landscapes, in which Cozens clearly attempted to capture his patron’s responses to the landscape as much as, if not more than, his own. As a result, they contrast strongly with the more serene and peaceful watercolors that Cozens produced for other patrons during his final decade, and London and the Thames from Greenwich is typical of these other works.

Signed and dated 1792, this watercolor was one of the last of a series of interpretations of this view from one of Cozens’s most active periods, when he produced multiple versions of earlier continental subjects, dating back to his earliest travels with Richard Payne Knight in 1776 and including subjects from his sketchbooks of 1782–83.¹ From 1790, he was painting these repeat watercolors on commission for various patrons and may have stayed with some of them in Essex and the Lake District, as a number of views of these areas had not appeared previously in his work. His watercolors from this prolific period are similar in tone and stylistic approach to this view of Greenwich, in blues, grays, greens, and light brown, with darker grays creating an almost mannered rhythm in the foreground foliage that sets off the blue washes, touched with details, of the distance—the whole mood set by the peaceful English summer sky. The artist John Constable was familiar with these later landscapes, in which he felt the sky was the “chief organ of sentiment.” Constable had them in mind when he described Cozens’s work as “all poetry.” The historian of British watercolor painting Martin Hardie noted, “Seldom has any artist succeeded with such subtlety and delicacy in evoking the spirit and sentiment of a scene.”²

The sentiment that inspired Cozens to paint this view of London from Greenwich was probably a deeply personal one. Cozens lived with his father, Alexander, and his mother (the daughter of the engraver John Pine, a friend of Hogarth’s) on Tottenham Court Road. From 1764 until at least 1771, he lived on Leicester Street, after which he may have gone to live with his uncle, the painter Robert Edge Pine, in Bath for a short time. Drawings in an album in the National Library of Wales indicate that Cozens spent these teenage years sketching in the environs of London—in Hampstead, Epsom, Blackheath, and Maze Hill in Greenwich—and traveled to visit another uncle, the Reverend Horace Pine, in Suffolk.³ His connections with his maternal family were thus quite close. His paternal grandparents were Richard Cozens, a shipbuilder from Deptford who was employed by Peter the Great in St. Petersburg, where Alexander was born in 1717, and Mary Davenport, the daughter of another of Peter’s shipbuilders. Alexander’s immediate family, his parents and sisters, were still in Russia when John Robert was growing up, but he must have had aunts and uncles in the Deptford and Greenwich area. John Robert wrote of drawing with “Newton” in Maze Hill in 1768—probably William Newton (1735–1790), an architect and later clerk of the works at Greenwich Hospital who lived in a house at the top of Maze Hill. Alexander Cozens had drawn a portrait of Newton about 1771, and Newton had subscribed to Alexander’s publication The Principles of Beauty.⁴ Alexander had painted a large, detailed, topographical watercolor view of Greenwich and London taken from Woolwich in 1766 that was very unusual in his oeuvre.⁵ Thus, Greenwich and London and its environs held memories of John Robert’s youth, which are subtly reflected in London and the Thames from Greenwich.

One indication that this view had personal meaning for the artist is the fact that the viewpoint is not the usual one taken from the Observatory at Greenwich, or from One Tree Hill just beside it, but is taken from a point further to the northeast, where William Newton, who died in 1790, had his “dwelling house most desirably situated on the Height of Maize-Hill, Greenwich.”⁶ A deer park still exists in that corner of Greenwich Park where it borders with Blackheath. Another indication is the detail and prominence given to the depiction of the docks and especially the dockyard at Deptford, the first spot visible on the Thames where the trees give way to the view on the left. This later version of the watercolor has a little less detail than some of the others, but it clearly depicts a ship being built or repaired in the dockyard and the large tall ships of the Royal Navy clustered just beyond, before the Thames gives way to more local shipping. John Robert’s grandfather was working in the Deptford Dockyard when he was tempted away by Peter the Great at the beginning of the century; the family’s ties with the navy continued through Alexander, who had been trained in his youth to draw coasting prospects and who taught drawing to Christ’s Hospital students intended as midshipmen or for apprenticeship. One of these students may have been William Newton, who was a pupil at Christ’s Hospital until 1750.
 

St. Paul’s Cathedral and the spires of city churches designed by Sir Christopher Wren are clearly visible in the center of the composition, and to their right are the twin towers of the Royal Hospital at Greenwich, also Wren’s design. As clerk of the works to the later architect of Greenwich Hospital, James Stuart, in the 1780s, Newton was responsible for the decorative work in the rebuilding of its chapel, connected to the dome on the right but not visible in this view. The small tower and hills seen in the distance between the domes are the hills of Hampstead and Highgate, which John Robert Cozens had drawn in 1770 and 1771.

Smoke rises over the city and Westminster and drifts across to the southeast, where two further structures are carefully depicted—the spire of Southwark Cathedral near Clerkenwell, where Cozens may have lived on the south side of the river, and, in the far distance toward the left, the bulk of Windsor Castle. This clear depiction of Windsor Castle on the horizon in the view from Greenwich is intriguing. Cozens could have left it out, as one really needs to know it is there to find it, and the castle would not have always been visible from Greenwich. Cozens painted the large and beautiful Distant View of Windsor Castle from the South West (fig. 17.1) about the same time that he was painting his views from Greenwich in the early 1790s.⁷ Both Windsor and Greenwich are Royal Parks, but Windsor also had a personal connection for Cozens, as his father had been drawing master to the pupils at Eton College from the 1760s, taking rooms in town, where doubtless John Robert had joined him, and from 1778 until around 1784 Alexander was official drawing master to Princes William and Edward.⁸ Perhaps John Robert Cozens was bookending his life and memories with these two quintessentially English landscapes.

Two years after he painted this view from Greenwich, Cozens became seriously incapacitated by mental illness and was put in the care of Dr. Monro; his family received financial support from the Royal Academy of Arts (where he had once exhibited), and the contents of his studio (which included much of his father’s work and books as well) were sold at auction by Greenwood. Joseph Mallord William Turner and Thomas Girtin famously made copies of John Robert Cozens’s works during this time, which were a great influence on their own work, most notably Turner’s London from Greenwich, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1809 (now in Tate Britain). Cozens died in Monro’s care at the end of 1797 and was buried on New Year’s Day at St. James’s Church, Clerkenwell. —Kim Sloan