Art: Alexander the Obscure

“Genius,” Alexander Cozens once wrote, “conceives strongly, invents with originality, and executes readily.” Few of his contemporaries and fewer since his day thought of applying that pithy observation to Cozens himself. But recently the obscure, 18th Century Briton has been coming into his own. Last week his paintings were the standouts of an exhibition of romantic English watercolors at New Haven’s Yale University Art Gallery.

Born in Russia in 1717, Cozens was either the son of a British shipbuilder at the court of Peter the Great, or the natural son of Czar Peter himself—Cozens’ family genealogists differ. He made his reputation in England not as an artist but as an “Instructor in Drawing to the Young Princes” and as the author of such curious treatises as The Principles of Beauty relative to the Human Head and the New Method for assisting the Invention in the Composition of Landscape.

Cozens’ new method was a queer one, and never saw general use. As a contemporary described it, the artist “dashed out upon several pieces of paper a series of accidental smudges and blots in black, brown and grey, which, being floated on, he impressed again on another paper and . . . converted into romantic rocks, woods, towers, steeples, cottages, rivers, fields and waterfalls.”

Having hit upon the trick accidentally when one of his drawing papers was stained, Cozens found it a useful method of getting his students to concentrate on the main shapes of an imaginary landscape instead of on niggling outlines. “In Nature,” he wrote, “forms are not distinguished by lines but by shape and colour.” Antedating impressionism by more than a century, Cozens might be called its great-grandfather. His students and his son John Robert imitated Cozens’ spontaneity and broad brush work; Turner and John Constable imitated theirs, and the French impressionists took over from there.

Cozens was long neglected by connoisseurs, who preferred more precise artists. But as George Bernard Shaw predicted in 1883,* photography has come to make laboriously naturalistic art look silly, and so Cozens’ reputation has waxed. He is now recognized, as British Critic Paul Oppe puts it, to be “an artist whose work is valuable in itself apart from time and place—some indeed would call it the most exciting and original in all English landscape painting.”

* “In photography,” Shaw wrote confidently, “thought and judgment count for everything; whereas for the etching and daubing process … the execution counts for more . . . Nine-tenths of painting as we understand it at present [will be] extinguished by the competition of these photographs . . .”