John robert cozens biography
- Biography.
- John Robert Cozens (1752 – 14 December 1797) was a British draftsman and painter of romantic watercolour landscapes.
- John Robert Cozens was a British draftsman and painter whose watercolours influenced several generations of British landscape painters.
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John Robert Cozens
English painter (1752–1797)
John Robert Cozens (1752 – 14 December 1797) was a British draftsman and painter of romantic watercolourlandscapes.
Cozens executed watercolors in curious atmospheric effects and illusions which had an influence on Thomas Girtin and J. M. W. Turner. His poetic work included Alpine views and a sense of vastness.[citation needed]John Constable described Cozens as "the greatest genius that ever touched landscape."
In June 2010 Cozen'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.[1]
Biography
The son of the Russian-born drawing master and watercolouristAlexander Cozens, John Robert Cozens was born in London. He studied under his father and began to exhibit some early drawings with the Society of Artists in 1767. In 1776 he displayed 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.&# John Robert COZENS London 1752 - London 1797 Biography ‘All poetry…the greatest genius that ever touched landscape.’ The painter John Constable’s opinion of the work of John Robert Cozens reflects something of the esteem in which his watercolour landscapes were held long after his death. The only son and pupil of the drawing master Alexander Cozens, John Robert Cozens first exhibited at the Society of Artists in 1767 and continued to do so until 1771. In 1776 he made his first trip to Italy, thirty years after that of his father. In the company of the scholar, antiquarian and collector Richard Payne Knight, the younger Cozens travelled through Switzerland and the Alps before arriving in Rome in November 1776. He was to stay in Rome for almost two and half years, until April 1779, making sketching tours of the Roman countryside, often working alongside the Welsh artist Thomas Jones. It was also in Rome that Cozens worked up his Swiss alpine sketches into larger, atmospheric watercolours for Payne Knight and other patrons. A second trip to Italy in 1782-1783, in the retinue o Painter, draughtsman and printmaker, part of an English family of artists, son of Alexander Cozens, who is best known for drawings of imaginary mountain landscapes. His son, John Robert Cozens (1752- 97), was also a landscape painter. Most of his work derived from two continental journeys in 1776-79 and 1782-83, during which he visited Italy and Switzerland. On the first he was probably draughtsman to Richard Payne Knight, and on the second he was part of the entourage of William Beckford (a former pupil of his father). In 1793 he became insane and was cared for by Dr Monro. Although his watercolours were based on sketches made on the spot, he by no means restricted himself to topographical exactitude and he often transposed landscape features in the interests of a more poetical composition. But he does not seem ever to have composed wholly from imagination, as his father did. His narrow but subtly gradated range of subdued colour is intensely evocative of the serene natural effects which appealed so strongly to his poetic melancholy. He was the most talented of
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Biography