John Sell Cotman remains a shadowy figure in early 19th-century British art. Born in Norwich in 1782, he was, like many painters of his time, self-taught. In his youth he was close to the brilliant but short-lived Thomas Girtin, as well as to JMW Turner.
Like his friends, Cotman was a pioneer of independent watercolour painting. Unlike them, he attained little fame in his lifetime, spending much of it as a teacher of drawing to the wives and daughters of Norfolk notables.
He is best known for the melancholy watercolours of his early years: church spires the colour of mouldering cheddar, piercing turbulent skies full of fast-moving cloud; fine Gothic cathedrals drawn with a lacemaker’s precision, rising from the higgledy-piggledy structures of England’s old medieval towns. They are an equivalent, in painting, to the early poetry of Wordsworth: a solitary walker’s attempts to find meaning in the derelict remains of the past and the mighty spectacle of nature.
A new Cotman exhibition opens with a selection of such moodily introspective images: from 1801, a depiction of the village of Brecknock, rising above the twinned arches of a crumbling bridge; from 1806, a monumental view of Durham Cathedral, its Gothic tracery outlined against a sky the colour of dirty snow.
But the heart of the show lies in Normandy. It focuses on the work Cotman produced between 1817 and 1820, on three tours to northern France, under the patronage of banker and antiquarian Dawson Turner. These trips resulted in the lavishly illustrated Architectural Antiquities of Normandy. The exhibition is drawn mostly from Cotman’s preparatory studies for this tome.
In Normandy, Cotman was shocked by the destruction wrought on the region’s religious buildings by the iconoclasts of the French Revolution. He painted and drew structures that survived with a sharpened sense of their vulnerability: his Church of St Jacques at Dieppe, the West Front, of 1818, makes that venerable medieval edifice, with its heavily buttressed tower and sunburst of a rose window, seem as friable as a ginger biscuit.
Peering into the crypt of the church at St Gervais at Rouen, Cotman was enthralled by the contrast of inky blackness and sudden shafts of sunlight, intrigued by the close resemblance between so-called Norman arches and their Roman predecessors, and dramatised the whole into something closely resembling a scene from a Gothic novel – complete with a tiny, cowering figure stranded in the gloom.
Visiting Caen, he was struck by the people’s apparent indifference to their own finest buildings. Unless he had drawn An Old House in the Rue St Jean in 1817, its splendid manorial façade would be entirely forgotten.
There was a broadly cultural as well as narrowly architectural agenda behind these poignant studies. Dawson Turner believed the true course of knowledge had been blocked by the enmity between England and France.
Most English people had no idea that the true origins of the style they considered their own, namely Gothic, actually lay in France. In the vitriolic words of John Carter, official draughtsman to the Society of Antiquaries, no “foreign works” should be held up “as superior to our own; and in particular the name of France should never be introduced”.
The larger purpose behind Architectural Antiquities of Normandy was to demolish such prejudices. Its message fell on deaf ears and only a handful of copies were sold.
But it deserves to be remembered: a heartfelt attempt to redraw cultural relations between England and France, in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars.
To Jan 13, www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk
This article also appeared in SEVEN magazine, free with the Sunday Telegraph.
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