John Robert Cozens (1752 – 14 December 1797) was an English painter of romantic watercolour landscapes, nearly all of Continental scenes. His career was brief and his production relatively low, but he had an enormous influence on later English watercolourists. Cozens painted striking watercolours which influenced Thomas Girtin and J. M. W. Turner, who together made copies of many of them when young, paid by Dr Monro, and has been described as "perhaps the most poetic of English painters".Mallalieu, 185 Despite using a "very limited palette, usually blues, greys, and greens, [and] the simplest of compositions ... there is a grandeur and simplicity about his best work which appeals directly to the heart".Mallalieu, 185 John Constable described Cozens as "all poetry", and "the greatest genius that ever touched landscape."Hardie, 132. These are from two different letters.
According to Andrew Wilton, Cozens was the "progenitor" of the revolution in British watercolour in the 1790s, having "in the 1770s systematised a method of applying watercolour pigment, without the admixture of bodycolour or any other substance, that for the first time comprehensively answered the requirement of landscape painting that it should represent vast expanses of land and sky".Wilton, 17-18 Martin Hardie says he was one of the first British watercolourists to use the medium consistently for its own sake as a purely expressional means", rather than a topographical record.Hardie, 131
Most of his watercolours show scenes from two extended visits to the Alps and Italy, where he made numerous sketches, mostly just in line and a greyish wash. These were then worked up into fresh paintings back in London, often the same sketch being used a number of times, sometimes with different effects.As an example, the description to a dealer's Lake Nemi looking towards Genzano, lists other versions of this subject. At the age of 42 he had a complete mental collapse, from which he never recovered in the remaining three years of his life.
In June 2010 Cozens's Lake Albano (c.1777) sold at auction, at Sotheby's in London, for £2.4 million, a record for any 18th-century British watercolour.British watercolour sales sets new records at telegraph.co.uk The "Statement of the Expert Adviser to the Secretary of State" in connection with the export of this noted that the previous record Cozens price was £240,000 for Cetara, Gulf of Salerno, Italy, sold at Christie's in November 2004 to the National Gallery of Art in Washington."Statement of the Expert Adviser to the Secretary of State that the watercolour meets Waverley criteria two and three" In 2019 a temporary export ban was placed on the Lake Albano work, in the hope that the funds to match the price could be raised by a UK collection.UK Government Press release "Cozens’s greatest masterpiece at risk of export" More typical recent prices (after a general decline in watercolour prices) are below £100,000.Example from 2017 at Christie's, £75,000 for View of Vietri and Raito, Lot 103, 5 July 2017. Both of these were from the collection of Ian Craft.
Biography Early life
The son of the Russian-born drawing master and watercolourist Alexander Cozens (c. 1717–1786), John Robert Cozens was born in London. His mother Charlotte was a daughter of John Pine (1690–1756),Hardie, 79 an engraver with a print shop in St Martin's Lane, who was a friend of William Hogarth, who included a portrait of him as the "fat friar" in The Gate of Calais, one of his prints.Mackenzie, 275 Alexander was a fashionable teacher of watercolour, "for whom theorising and codifying were as natural as breathing",Wilton, 36 who had developed theories on depicting landscapes, including his famous (or notorious) advocacy of building compositions up from random blots of ink, earning him the derisive epithet of the "Blotmaster". Alexander wrote several books on the theory and practice of landscape watercolours, and John Robert tended to be referred to in the contemporary art world by terms such as "the younger Cozens".Hardie, 78-86; unlike his son, Alexander's reputation was low during the 19th century, but was revived from about the 1920s.
John Robert studied under his father and his mature work shows his father's influence in several important respects, including the very muted colour values, and the readiness to abandon balanced, harmonized and idealized compositions in the tradition of Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin.Wilton, 37 He began to exhibit some early drawings (as watercolours were usually then called) with the Society of Artists in 1767, when he was only 15.Hardie, 132 An album of drawings in the National Library of Wales includes sketches of the dramatic rock formations of the Peak district made in 1772 on a trip to Matlock, Derbyshire.Lyles, 154
His uncle Robert Edge Pine was a portrait painter based in Bath, Somerset (as was another painter-uncle Simon Pine, who died in 1772),"Pine, Simonneau", Neil Jeffares, Dictionary of pastellists before 1800, online edition and between about 1772 and 1776 Cozens also lived there "with or near his uncle", who later moved to America.Lyles, 154 In 1773 Cozens's name appears on a set of eight etched prints Eight Views of the most Elegant Scenes of and in Bath, sold individually for a guinea each, uncoloured; many copies were then hand-coloured by dealers or buyers. Most are townscapes of the new Georgian town, but include some views of the distant city with a landscape foreground, but without much sign of his individual style.Mackenzie, 131
In 1776 he exhibited the large oil painting, A Landscape with Hannibal in His March Over the Alps, Showing to His Army the Fertile Plains of Italy (now lost) at the Royal Academy in London.Kim Sloan "Alexander and John Robert Cozens - The Poetry of Landscape" (1986). This painting was the only oil that Cozens exhibited at the Academy and may have influenced J. M. W. Turner's to paint of a similar subject decades later.Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps by J. M. W. Turner from 1812.
A small near-monochrome watercolour roundel, 26 cm across, by Cozens of the subject was one of a group of five roundels. Andrew Wilton had noted that although they are thought to date from before Cozens's foreign travels, it "displays in remarkably complete form the style Cozens is supposed to have evolved specifically in response to his experience of the Alps".Hannibal's march over the Alps, Christie's, Lot 25, Live Auction 6724 "British Art of Paper", 5 June 2003 (realized £8,635) Cozens stood for election as an Associate of the Academy the same year, but received no votes. He never stood again, nor submitted other works (watercolours were then not accepted).Hardie, 132
The two European trips Between 1776 and 1779 he travelled to Switzerland and Italy, where he drew Alpine and north Italian views. He travelled with the wealthy and highly cultivated Richard Payne Knight (then 26) as far as Rome, where Cozens remained until 1779, when he returned to London. Most of the sketches made on this trip were of Swiss scenes; they are now "widely scattered", with 24 in the British Museum. They show his style developing, rather than complete.Hardie, 133-134
Back in London the very wealthy author and collector William Beckford, a friend, pupil and patron of Alexander Cozens, paid Cozens to turn his sketches into watercolours, as did other collectors. In 1782 he made his second visit to Italy, as part of the large entourage of Beckford (then 22), spending time at Naples from July, where both Cozens and Beckford had bouts of malaria. They then stayed with Sir William Hamilton, the British ambassador to the Kingdom of Naples at his villa in Portici near the city, and (initially) Hamilton's wife Catherine, who died in August 1782. In September Beckford sailed for home, with Cozens remaining in Italy.Hardie, 134-135 The Welsh painter Thomas Jones, then part of the same circle in Naples, noted that this left Cozens "once more a free agent and loosed from the shackles of fantastic folly and caprice".Reynolds, 65 His works show scenes from as far south as Sicily, though Martin Hardie did not think that he actually went there, suggesting that several images of Mount Etna and other Sicilian sites were based on works by others.Hardie, 134
Back in London In 1783 he returned to England, soon after which he fell out with Beckford, who complained in letters to Alexander about the late delivery of promised paintings.Munro, 51 It is on his paintings of Continental subjects that his fame largely rests, and these were the bulk of his output; many subjects were repeated in different versions.Mallalieu, 185-186; Wilton, 314; Hardie, 132 The subjects repeated most often include Lake Albano, Lake Nemi, the Villa d'Este and other views at Tivoli, and the Greek temples at Paestum.Reynolds, 65 Many, very likely most, of his watercolours were evidently produced back in England, based on the sketch drawings he had made abroad; most are not dated. Scholarship can compare the various versions, and the progress of the image from the original sketch made in Italy; a lot essay by Sotheby's shows the original sketch, a tracing of it by Cozens, one of his watercolour paintings, and a copy by Turner.In the Valley near Vietri, Sotheby's, New York, "Master Works on Paper", Lot 55, 25 January 2023 A sweeping Alpine view, Pays de Valais, is based on a sketch of 1776 from his first tour, now in the Soane Museum, which on the verso has a list of "eight patrons who had ordered finished watercolours of the subject". Known surviving versions are in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Yale, Leeds, Birmingham (2), Agnew's (in 1994), and Stourhead, the only one whose provenance can be traced back to a name on the list.Munro, 49
He only left a few paintings of English scenes,Hardie, 137 though six versions are known of London from Greenwich Hill; two are dated with 1791 and 1792,Lot essay, London from Greenwich Hill, Christie's, Lot 10, Sale 5499, "British Watercolours", 7 November 1995 though by the 1790s he seems to have been producing fewer paintings in general. One unusually large watercolour (642 x 920 mm, dated 1790) of The Chasm at Delphi was based third-hand on a sketch made by James "Athenian" Stuart, itself made "under the direction of a traveller who had recently visited the spot".Munro, 50
There are a number of surviving sketchbooks from the second visit; the "Beaumont Album" has 215 drawings and belonged to Sir George Beaumont and his descendants from around the time of Cozens's death until 1967.Christie's, Lot Essay for In the Tyrol, sold 5 July 2022 It is now in the Yale Center for British Art. Seven sketchbooks are now in the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester."Cozens and Cozens", past exhibition at the Whitworth.
Later years
Few details are known about his life in the years between his return in 1783 and his breakdown in 1794, essentially his thirties. He may have taught, as most watercolourists did, as well as working up his sketches into paintings. He was probably the "Mr Cozens" paid as drawing master to the Princes Ernest (born 1771) and Augustus (born 1773) in Royal Household records of 1787–88.Hardie, 136 His father had been "Instructor in Drawing to the Young Princes" since 1781, but had died in 1786.Hardie, 80