Lot 68: John Robert Cozens (1752-1797)

The Galleria di Sopra, above Lake Albano, with the rays of the setting sun
pencil and watercolour
17 x 24 1/4 in. (43.2 x 61.6 cm.)

Sudbury, Gainsborough's House Society, Gainsborough to Constable, 1991, no. 14.
Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, May 1997 - April 2004, on loan.

with Agnew's, London.

Lake Albano, in the Alban hills near Rome, was a favourite sketching ground with the young British artists living in Rome in the 1770s and 1780s, and its scenery became a subject especially associated with John Robert Cozens. He returned to it many times, reflecting perhaps his patrons' preferences as much as his own. This subject, and a closely related one incorporating the Pope's summer residence at Castel Gandolfo nearby, were so popular with his patrons that the motif of the arching tree enclosing a distant view of the misty Campagna has acquired something of the status of an icon in Cozens's work.
He set out for his first tour of Italy, in the entourage of the influential connoisseur and collector Richard Payne Knight, in August 1776, and returned to England two years later. During that time he made numerous pencil studies, simple outlines or delicately washed drawings (see fig. 1), from which he worked up finished watercolours, initially for Payne Knight but subsequently for other patrons on commission, both in Italy and later in England. In this celebrated series of works he evolved a delicate yet forceful personal style that expresses the magic atmosphere of the places discovered by the British on the Grand Tour - a style that was to have a profound influence on the great masters of British landscape who succeeded Cozens in the closing years of the 18th Century.

Cozens made many versions and variants of popular subjects (see fig. 2), always maintaining the intensity of vision that attended his initial encounter with Italy. The wooded road along the top of the ridge that fringes the volcanic lake is one of his least apparently 'sublime' motifs, informal, almost intimate in its concern only with trees and light. Yet Cozens achieves an image of immense power with these simple ingredients. The distant perspective of the plain of the Campagna forms a poetic foil to the mysterious road that winds in dappled light along the Galleria, and the trees etch an idiosyncratic pattern of ellusive beauty against the luminous sky. The different versions of this subject vary considerably in detail and handling, but all preserve the blend of Claudian grandeur with Cozens's own very personal brand of ideal landscape.

For other views of the Galleria di Sopra above Lake Albano see C.F. Bell and T. Girtin, 'The Drawings and Sketches of John Robert Cozens', Walpole Society, 1934-4, vol. XXIII, p. 47, nos. 152-5. No. 154, pl. XVa, formerly in the collection of Paul Oppé (see fig. 1) appears to be a study for the present watercolour.

We are grateful to Andrew Wilton for his help in preparing this catalogue entry.

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