Description
THE PROPERTY OF A PRIVATE COLLECTION
BETWEEN CHAMONIX AND MARTIGNY - THE AIGUILLE VERTE
BETWEEN CHAMONIX AND MARTIGNY - THE AIGUILLE VERTE
44 by 61.5 cm., 17 1/4 by 24 1/4 in.
watercolour over pencil on laid paper
PROVENANCE
F.J.C. Holdsworth;
Victor Rienacker Esq., (by 1922);
J. Leslie Wright, Haseley House, Warwick (by 1935);
by descent to his daughter, Mrs Cecil Keith;
Thomas Agnew and Sons, Ltd. (1984);
Anonymous sale in these Rooms, 28th November 2002, lot 11
EXHIBITED
London, Burlington Fine Arts Club, Catalogue of the Exhibition of a Collection of Drawings by John Robert Cozens, 1922-23, no. 39, pl. XXI;
London, Royal Academy, Exhibition of British Art, 1934, no. 888;
Birmingham, City Museum and Art Gallery, Early English Watercolours from the Collections of J. Leslie Wright and Walter Turner, April 1938, no. 41;
Bath, Holburne Museum, J. Leslie Wright Collection, 1947, no. 95;
Birmingham, City Museum and Art Gallery, Richard Wilson and his Circle, 1948-49, no. 154;
London, Royal Academy, Exhibition of the J. Leslie Wright Collection of Masters of British Watercolours, 1949, no. 115;
London, Burlington Galleries (Arts Council), Three Centuries of British Water-Colours and Drawings, 1951, no. 50;
Paris, British Council, British Landscape Painting, 1953, no. 36;
Worthing, Museum and Art Gallery, English Watercolour Drawings from the Collection of Mrs. Cecil Keith, 1963, no. 20;
Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, De Englese Aquarel van Cozens tot Turner, 1965, no. 25;
Geneva, Musée d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève et le Mont Blanc, 1965, no. 26;
Manchester, Whitworth Art Gallery; and London, Victoria and Albert Museum, Watercolours by John Robert Cozens, 1971, no. 1;
Munich, British Council, Zweijahrhunderte der Englische Malerie, 1979-80, no. 75;
London, Thomas Agnew and Sons Ltd., The Watercolour Collection Formed by Mrs. Cecil Keith, 1984, no. 61
LITERATURE
C.F. Bell and Thomas Girtin, `The Drawings and Sketches of Robert Cozens,' The Walpole Society, vol. XXIII, Oxford, 1934-35, p. 28, no. 8;
H.J. Paris, English Watercolour Painters, London, 1945, pp. 6 and 15 (illustrated);
The Illustrated London News, 15 October 1945, p. 591;
A.P. Oppe, Alexander and John Robert Cozens, London, 1952, p. 133;
W. Gaunt, Everyman's Dictionary of Pictorial Art, 1962 (illustrated);
A. Bury, `Old English Watercolours and Drawings in the Collection of Mrs. Cecil Keith,' The Old Water-Colour Society Club, vol. SLII, 1967, p. 13 (illustrated);
A. Wilton, British Watercolours 1750-1850, 1977, pp. 27 and 182, no. 51 (illustrated)
NOTE
John Constable RA (1776-1837), described Cozens in 1835 as `the greatest genius that ever touched landscape' (letter to William Carpenter) and the present watercolour shows him at the height of his powers. Kim Sloan, when writing about the Victoria and Albert version of this work, described its effect as `a profound respectful silence, as if in a cathedral at the top of the world, with the needles forming the arches and the sky the loft' (see Kim Sloan, Alexander and John Robert Cozens, 1986, p. 120).
Cozens records a snow-covered Mount Blanc from across a valley with two figures in the foreground dwarfed by the vastness of their surroundings. Typically, he emphasized the powerlessness of man in comparison to the great forces of nature. As Andrew Wilton (loc.cit., p. 28) concluded, `his figures are usually introduced to point up the smallness of man in his natural surroundings, and to show the large scale of Cozens's wide spaces.' The typically restrained colouring certainly lends the watercolour an atmosphere of timelessness and foreboding, combined with a melancholy beauty.
This watercolour is based on a sketch by Cozens executed on the spot on 30th August 1776 (Yale Center for British Art, Yale, Fig. 1). He left London in the summer of that year in the company of the connoisseur and writer Richard Payne Knight. Payne Knight was twenty-six at the time and was celebrated as a champion of the theory of the Picturesque. They entered Switzerland at Geneva, reached Sallanches on the 26th August and Chamonix on the 30th before travelling down to Italy, where Cozens remained until 1779.
In the Alps, Cozens made fifty-seven almost monochrome sketches for Payne Knight, which he used as the basis for many of his later works. Adrian Bury states that in this 'version, Cozens has much improved on the original sketch, emphasizing the sublimity of the scene.'
The Alps and particularly the area around Mont Blanc had always inspired descriptions of the sublime. In 1772 M.T. Bourrit wrote of this area that of all the pictures nature presents us `those of mountains covered with eternal snows, whose summits reach beyond clouds, and whose forms are so majestic, are by far the most affecting as they fill the mind with an idea of her grandeur and her sublimity.'
Cozens returned to Italy in 1782 in the company of William Beckford (see lot 228). They spent time in Rome and stayed with Sir William and Lady Hamilton in Naples but Cozens was back in London by later 1783.
Little is known of Cozens' life on his return but he presumably supported himself by producing watercolours based on his Swiss and Italian sketches and perhaps by teaching. A 'Mr Cozens' was on the Royal Staff as drawing master to Princes Ernest and Augustus in 1787-88. On the 26th January 1794, Joseph Farington noted in his diary that `Cozens is paralytic to a degree that has incapacitated him' and a few weeks later `Cozens is now confined under the care of Dr. Monro, who has no expectation of his recovery, as it is a total deprivation of the nervous faculty.' He spent the last three years of his life insane and in the care of the noted collector and amateur artist Dr Thomas Monro who nurtured the talents of the young Turner and Girtin (lots 221,224 & 225) amongst others, paying the artists to copy works by Cozens. A copy of the 1776 version of this subject by Turner, executed for Dr Monro in the mid 1790s, was in the J. Leslie Wright Collection (see Thos. Agnew & Sons, Exhibition Catalogue 1984, no. 60) and is now in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (P40553).
Constable was not the only artist to admire the startling originality and recognise the tour de force of sublimity which Cozens is the first to encapsulate in his watercolours. Johann Heinrich Fuseli, R.A., (1741-1825), the great eighteenth century fantasist, was moved to say of him `he followed the arrangements of nature which he saw with an enchanted eye and drew with an enchanted hand.'
