This beautifully romantic view of a glowing sunset on the Amalfi Coast was described as a “Capital drawing” when it was sold for five guineas at the auction in 1805 of about ninety watercolors that William Beckford (1760–1844) had commissioned from John Robert Cozens to commemorate his Italian journey of 1782. Both Beckford and Cozens had visited Italy before: Cozens had traveled with the connoisseur and author on the picturesque, Richard Payne Knight, in 1776–78, and Beckford had made a Grand Tour in 1780. Beckford was one of the wealthiest men in England; his fortune, like many at this time, was built on the backs of enslaved people on sugar plantations in the West Indies. His second tour of the continent took the form of an almost royal progress; his entourage included a tutor, a physician, a musician, and the artist John Robert Cozens, who could also play the violoncello. Beckford was a young, capricious, and demanding patron, and in July they were driven in great haste through the summer heat of Rome to Naples, where they were nursed through bouts of malaria at Sir William Hamilton’s villa at Portici. Beckford’s greatest friend and confidante, Catherine, Lady Hamilton, was very ill and died not long after their arrival, as did his musician, and Beckford boarded a ship in September, leaving John Robert Cozens “Once more a free Agent and loosed from the Shackles of fantastic folly and Caprice.”¹ Cozens then spent several weeks sketching on the eastern part of what is now called the Amalfi Coast in the Gulf of Salerno before returning to Naples, where he spent an additional two months sketching in its environs before heading back to Rome at the end of the year.

John Robert Cozens had gained his place in Beckford’s employ through his father, Alexander Cozens (see cats. 5 and 6), who had given drawing lessons to Beckford since at least 1774 and had formed a close bond with the young man whose dreams and imaginings found a receptive and encouraging audience in the older man.² Beckford published his fanciful and romantic letters that described his continental tours, and Alexander was the initial recipient of many of them.³ Alexander, in turn, was described by Beckford “as full of systems as the universe,” constantly devising and revising his methods for composing landscapes that could inspire “sentiments,” which his son had absorbed fully and employed to great effect in his own watercolor landscapes, especially those painted for Beckford based on sketches made during this tour. Beckford had seen and admired the watercolors that John Robert Cozens had produced from his first tour, of the Alps and Italy, and had commissioned some even before his own first tour. Waiting for this group of views, Beckford wrote to Alexander from Naples in 1780, “Does your son go on with my drawings? I hope he does—he cannot make too many. Having seen Italy I value them more than ever if that be possible. My Affect. Compliments wait upon him. Circe desires to be included in the remembrance since no artist ever did ampler justice to her promontory.”⁴

This beautiful watercolor depicts the view looking over the town of Marina di Vietri toward Raito, nestled on the hill below Monte Pertuso, in the soft light of evening. In its lyrical composition and deep colors (especially the blues, greens, and gamboge, with touches of red for the rooftops and the dramatically lit clouds) painted on special paper not used elsewhere in his work, this watercolor is typical of the nearly ninety others that Cozens painted for Beckford. Cozens later created at least six other versions of this composition for other patrons, but they are all pale blue-grays and brown in tone.⁵ None of them share the dramatic sky and deep coloring that distinguishes the group for Beckford from any of his other works—a convincing reason for believing that, in this group, Cozens was creating dramatic and evocative compositions that were more suited to his patron’s personal taste and fervent imagination than to his own.⁶ Notably, ten of the Beckford watercolors by Cozens are of this stretch of the coastline below Naples, all drawn after Beckford left, and no evidence indicates that Beckford ever visited this coast.

Cozens opened a new sketchbook and spent from September 18 to October 1, 1782, sketching along this stretch of the coast to the west of the larger town of Salerno, nearly entirely around Vietri, where he must have been based, as most of the views are from Vietri, with a few from Salerno or from the sea. There are twenty drawings in total in this series, in graphite with gray ink washes, including the sketch for this watercolor, made on September 23 (fig. 16.1), and another very similar view, on a double-page spread in what was the third sketchbook of seven that survive from this tour.⁷ Most of the drawings leave the sky blank, freeing Cozens to use whatever cloud effects and time of day were most appropriate to produce the mood for the finished watercolors. We know that Beckford’s favorite time of day was twilight, and that he was not fond of stormy or cloudy weather, which depressed him, but Cozens used the sky and clouds to create atmosphere in his landscapes, as taught by his father. Beckford understood and appreciated this method, as he owned an album of twenty-five monochromatic studies of skies painted by Alexander (now in the Hermitage).⁸ As previously noted, the vivid colors of Cozens’s Beckford watercolors contrast strongly with the artist’s usual, more muted palette, but they are not without precedent in his work or in the work of his father. Alexander’s landscapes were usually brown and gray in tone, fairly monochromatic, and very rarely colored, but his paintings in oil were very vividly colored, with bright oranges, yellows, pinks, blues, and greens, with glorious sunsets and dawns, often on rocky coastlines much like the one seen here, and the younger Cozens must have drawn on these for inspiration when painting for Beckford.⁹

Unlike his father, John Robert Cozens left no surviving letters or documents in his hand—only the inscriptions on his sketches and on the versos of some of his finished works, usually confined to a note of place and date and a brief description of particular buildings. However, two of the sketches in this sketchbook contain additional inscriptions that provide clues to his personal erudition and interests and shed light on why he spent so much time in this area that was never visited by Beckford. One is on the first drawing in the sketchbook, a view of Salerno with the castle above, inscribed “See Dryden’s Tancred & Sygismunda” on the verso. The reference is to a tale from the Decameron, which was published by Dryden in 1699 and by James Thompson in 1745 and was the subject of a well-known painting by Hogarth that was exhibited in 1761. Tancred was a prince of Salerno, and the reference is clearly a reminder to Cozens of the historical significance of the site. The other inscription, on the verso of the sketch for the present watercolor, is a long and intriguing one, unprecedented in his work, and worth quoting in full: "In the place where Marina de [sic] Vietri stands was anciently a city of the name of Marcinna / one of the three great cities on the Gulf of [erased] now called Salerno– The others were Vicensa / & Pestum–several statues & other remains were found in the subterraneous places & / a Temple of Diana–Marcinna extended a considerable way up the valley and was / destroyed above 2000 years ago by an inundation of the river Livone–on the hill where Vietri stands was a castle / an appendage to the city it was called Castel Vetero from which the name of Vietri is derived / Vicensa stood 4 or 5 miles to the east of Salerno /–The arch on the left hand, built by Carlo Quinto"¹⁰  

The source of Cozens’s information about the ancient history of this area is unknown, but it had been described by the Roman geographer Strabo, who especially mentioned Marcina, and by Pliny, who also described Salerno and the Etruscan and other tribes that inhabited this part of Campania.¹¹ William Hamilton, with whom Cozens stayed during this period, would have had editions of Strabo and Pliny in his library, but Cozens may have already been familiar with their work, as his own library included several books on Roman history, including Bolingbroke’s Works (1777) and especially Nathanial Hooke’s The Roman History from the Building of Rome to the Ruin of the Commonwealth (1770). John Robert Cozens had already demonstrated a particular interest in the history of Hannibal, having painted the small monochrome roundel Hannibal Showing His Army the Fertile Plains of Italy, and in 1776 he exhibited a large historical painting at the Royal Academy of Arts, A Landscape with Hannibal in His March over the Alps, Showing to His Army the Fertile Plains of Italy. The latter was very well received and may have been seen by Joseph Mallord William Turner, whose initial sketch for his own Snow Storm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps (1812) contains similar passages.¹² This inscription offers further proof of John Robert Cozens’s personal fascination not only with Roman history, classical accounts, and remains of antiquity but especially with Hannibal, who spent two years in this part of Campania around 214 BC, enlisting local tribes to his cause, including the inhabitants of Marcina (Vietri), Salerno, Picentia (called Vicensa in the eighteenth century), and Paestum. Cozens’s beautiful watercolors for Beckford have always been viewed as commissioned works, created to please his patron, but this inscription provides insight into his own fascination with the history of the area when contemplating, sketching, and interpreting the stunning coastal landscapes of the Gulf of Salerno. —Kim Sloan