The Anglers (in Avon Gorge)
Binyon, Laurence. “John Sell Cotman.” In John Crome and John Sell Cotman. London: Seeley & Co., 1897.
Clifford, Derek Plint. Watercolours of the Norwich School. London: Cory, Adams & Mackay, 1965.
Hawcroft, Francis W. “John Sell Cotman by Victor Rienaecker, Review.” Burlington Magazine 96, no. 615 (June 1954): 188–89.
Kitson, Sydney Decimus. The Life of John Sell Cotman. London: Faber & Faber, 1937.
Lyles, Anne, and Robin Hamlyn. British Watercolours from the Oppé Collection. London: Tate Gallery, 1997.
MacLeod, Dianne Sachko. “F. G. Stephens, Pre-Raphaelite Critic and Art Historian.” The Burlington Magazine 128, no. 999 (June 1986): 398–403, 405–6.
Rajnai, Miklós. John Sell Cotman, 1782–1842. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982.
Wilton, Andrew, and Anne Lyles. The Great Age of British Watercolours, 1750–1880. Munich: Prestel, 1993.
Wootton, David, Fiona Nickerson, and Catherine Andrews, eds. Bliss Was It in That Dawn to Be Alive: British Watercolours and Drawings 1750–1850. London: Chris Beetles, 2008.
ProvenanceThomas Woolner, R.A. (1825–1892); Mrs. Stephens; [Walker Gallery, London, by 1920]; Victor Rienaecker (1887–1960), by 1920; J. Leslie Wright (1862–1953), by 1938; Guy Harvey-Samuel (1887–1960); [Fine Art Society, London, by 1960]; [Sotheby’s, London, Master Works on Paper from Five Centuries, July 6, 2022, lot 56]; [Lowell Libson & Jonny Yarker, London, 2022]; purchased by MFAH, 2022.Born in Norwich, John Sell Cotman moved to London in 1798 and was employed to hand-color aquatints for the print publisher Rudolph Ackermann. He joined Dr. Thomas Monro’s informal academy in 1799 and attended Thomas Girtin’s Sketching Society, which he led upon Girtin’s death in 1802, renaming it Cotman’s Sketching Society.1 He moved back to Norwich in 1806 and joined the provincial Norwich School of painters the following year at the encouragement of John Chrome, who had founded the group in 1803 with Robert Ladbrooke. The Norwich School was inspired by the local natural landscape and influenced by Dutch seventeenth-century landscape artists such as Meindert Hobbema and Jacob van Ruisdael. Cotman became the group’s leader upon Chrome’s death in 1821 and remained so until his move back to London in 1834. Cotman was elected to the Old Water-Colour Society in 1825 and became a drawing professor at King’s College, London, in 1834.
Scholars have observed that Cotman used “pure, often bright washes to render his environment in simplified, even abstracted forms.”2 This composition is in the same spirit, portraying two brightly clothed people among the reeds along the edge of the water, fishing with a rod and line.3 The billowy trees in varied shades of green and yellow are the main protagonists. The image has affinities with an oil painting of the mid-1820s, The Silent Stream, Normandy, but The Anglers is more reminiscent of England.4 His handling of watercolor is more in line with his Landscape Composition – Classical Subject I and II, exhibited in 1833, and The Wind in the Trees, a watercolor of similar date, all derived from oil paintings of the previous decade.5
In the distance beyond the anglers, a boat sails down a river bound by tall cliffs, and an architectural structure rests atop one of them. The location of this watercolor has long been unidentified or presumed to be in Norfolk. However, the topography suggests that it is one of the most prominent landmarks on the Avon gorge: St. Vincent’s Rock on the River Avon in Clifton, on the outskirts of Bristol.6 Cotman stopped in Bristol in 1800 on the way to his Welsh tour and probably returned again in 1801–2.7 A letter by Cotman, dated January 27, 1831, was on the back of a drawing called The Pithay, Bristol, and one of the etchings in his Liber Studiorum: A Series of Sketches and Studies, published in 1838, is of Clifton.8 This watercolor joins Blasting St. Vincent’s Rock, Clifton, another watercolor of similar coloring, both of which were made by Cotman at about the same time and place when the cliff was being blasted for construction of the suspension bridge (fig. 38.1).9 For The Anglers, Cotman stood on the west bank of the river, looking toward the cliff, and he added the building atop it. It is probably a windmill for corn, erected in 1766, but transformed into an observatory when the artist William West bought it in 1828.10 St. Vincent’s Rock was a popular subject in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries for writers and artists exploring views that captured the picturesque and the sublime.11 —Dena M. Woodall
Notes
1. See A. P. Oppé, “Cotman and Sketching Society,” Connoisseur 67, no. 268 (1923): 189–98, and Jean Hamilton, The Sketching Society, 1799–1851, exh. cat. (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1971), 6–10.
2. See David Wooton, Fiona Nickerson, and Catherine Andrews, eds., Bliss Was It in That Dawn to Be Alive: British Watercolours & Drawings 1750–1850 (London: Chris Beetles, 2008), 23.
3. This watercolor has a distinguished provenance. It was owned by Thomas Woolner, a sculptor and poet who was a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and Victor Rienaecker, an art historian based at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, who published a number of books on John Sell Cotman. Furthermore, J. Leslie Wright was one of the most discerning collectors of British watercolors of the twentieth century.
4. John Sell Cotman, The Silent Stream, Normandy, c. 1824–28, oil on canvas, Norwich Castle Museum, Norfolk, UK [1951.235.120].
5. See John Sell Cotman, Landscape Composition – Classical Subject I, 1892, graphite, black chalk, and watercolor on paper, Norfolk Museums Collections [NWHCM:1899.4.17], and John Sell Cotman, Landscape Composition – Classical Subject I, no date, graphite, black chalk, and watercolor on paper, Norfolk Museums Collections [NWHCM:1899.4.18]. See also John Sell Cotman, The Wind in the Trees, 1831, watercolor on Whatman paper, Norwich City Museum [1947.217.196].
6. St. Vincent’s Rocks is also referred to as Clifton Gorge or Avon Gorge. In 1480 William Worcestre recorded the medieval chapel and hermitage of St. Vincent on “a most dangerous rock called Ghyston Cliff, in a deep place of the rock twenty yards in depth in the said rock above the river Avon.” See Frances Neale, ed., William Worcestre: The Topography of Medieval Bristol (Bristol: Bristol Record Society, 2000), 227. By the eighteenth century, others traveled here for the curative properties of a spring near the river. The cliff was blasted for the suspension bridge in 1831. Thanks to Craig S. Calvert for his study on this watercolor’s possible location using Google Earth Studio images.
7. He possibly returned through Bristol in 1801 and took a second Wales tour in 1802. See Miklós Rajnai, John Sell Cotman, 1782–1842 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), 10, 30.
8. The letter mentions that the drawing was signed and dated “J. S. Cotman 1831”; see the Cotman Collection, the Cotman Letters 1804–1833, SDK Sydney Decimus Kitson Archive [SDK/1/3/1/2, page 156], Leeds Art Gallery. See also View of Clifton, from the portfolio Liber Studiorum: A Series of Sketches and Studies, published by Henry George Bohn, London 1838, soft-ground etching, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1922 [22.100 (2)] [Popham 297]. It was based on the artist’s sketches made during his journey through Wales in 1800 and dedicated to “principles of Landscape composition.” See A. E. Popham, “The Etchings of John Sell Cotman,” Print Collector’s Quarterly 9 (1922): 236–73, cat. 297.
9. See John Sell Cotman, Blasting St. Vincent’s Rock, Clifton, c. 1830, Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, Beeler Fund, Mr. And Mrs. William R. Spurlock Fund, James E. Roberts Fund [1999.32].
10. The same structure is seen in a watercolor by Francis Danby. See Francis Danby, The Avon Gorge from the Stop Gate below Sea Walls, c. 1818, watercolor over traces of graphite with scratching out on paper, in Summer Catalogue (London: W.W. Fine Art and Andrew Wild 2009), cat. 14, illus.
11. Views by other artists include Joseph Mallord William Turner, View in the Avon Gorge, in Bristol and Malmesbury sketchbook, 1791, graphite, watercolor, and pen and brown ink on white wove paper, Tate, Turner Bequest VII G [D00114]; John Reverend Eden, The Avon above the Hotweels, c. early 1800s, graphite and watercolor, Bristol Museum and Art Gallery; Francis Nicholson, St. Vincent’s Rock, near Clifton, Gloucestershire, 1806, watercolor on paper, private collection; see Edward Wedlake Brayley and John Britton, The Beauties of England and Wales, vol. 5 (London: Vernor & Hood, 1910), 731, illus., Exhibition, The Art Gallery, Learnington, 1938, cat. 56, and Francis Danby, The Avon Gorge, Looking toward Clifton, c. 1820, watercolor and gouache over graphite on paper, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection [B1981.25.2007].
Comparative Images
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