Alexander Cozens: 80 Watercolours and Drawings

Alexander Cozens was a British landscape painter in watercolours, born in Russia. He taught drawing and wrote treatises on the subject, evolving a method in which imaginative drawings of landscapes could be worked up from abstract blots on paper. The style used by Cozens before he finally settled in Britain can be seen in a collection of fifty-four early drawings, mostly Italian scenes. They show him as a highly skilled draughtsman in the style of the time, with a feeling for elegant composition. Some are wholly in pen and ink in the manner of line engravings. Others show extensive landscapes elaborately drawn in pencil, and partly finished in ink. Others are washed in monochrome, and some in colour of a timid kind. In most there is little sky, but in one he has attempted a bold effect of sunlight streaming through cloud, and brightly illuminating several distinct spots in the landscape. There are several broad pencil drawings on greenish paper heightened with white. Altogether these show that by this time Cozens was a well-trained artist who observed nature for himself, and was not without poetical feeling. After his arrival in Britain he appears, to have adopted a much broader style, aiming at an imposing distribution of masses and large effects of light and shade. In 1785 Cozens published a pamphlet on this manner of drawing landscapes from blots, called A New Method of Assisting the Invention in Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape. Cozens defined a blot as "a production of chance with a small degree of design" and acknowledged the influence on his ideas of a passage in Leonardo da Vinci's Treatise on Painting, which recommends that artists should look for inspiration in stains or marks on old walls. Joseph Wright of Derby was influenced by Cozens, owned his paintings using his ideas as inspiration for his compositions.