COTMAN'S DRAWINGS AT THE BURLINGTON FINE ARTS CLUB.
THE Burlington Fine Arts Club is a shrine difficult of access. Certain formalities of name-signing, etc., after presenting the ticket of admission, must be gone through before the inner temple may be entered. This is fair enough, but why can no catalogue of the treasures on view be bought for love or money .' The loan of the useful booklet to visitors, during their tour round the room, is all that is vouchsafed by the authorities. Such difficulties surrounding the enjoy- ment of an art the Club is formed to honour seems to us to lower, rather than to enhance, its dignit}'. The exhibition of water-colours, chalk-drawings, and etchings by John Sell Cotman, now on view there, lionourably supplements the exhibition held last summer of this artist's work at Norwich, his native place, and the scene of many of his achievements. The exhibition is interesting. It has a charm and grace of its own. After a visit to the superb Reni- brandts at the Royal Academy, and to the rooms there, devoted to a show of Frank Holl's strenuous life's labour, the inspection of Cotman's work affects us as might the reading of a poet of the second rank, who was in harmony with the spirit of his age, some seventy years ago. It brings the reposeful sense of an art which is com- plete because of its limitations. There is about it a delicate flavour of sincerity, allied to a great respect for scholastic traditions. This absence of the more restless personal note is grateful now, when egoism is the most fertile and the most corroding influence in every sphere of activity. Fertile, in its development of the temperament of the artist as a ruling force at work ; corroding, in the irreverent attitude it develops towards the winnowed thought and experience of generations of painters. Cotman has nothing of the modern Impressionist about him. He seems to have felt none of that divine torment of soul that Turner felt when cai.v prixcx with nature in all its witchery and tumult. He has much of the reticence and freedom from eccentricity which is the strength and the charm of the Norwich school of painters, at the head of which stands ' Old ' Cronie. At no moment, however, does he touch the genius of this founder of the school in its sweetness, simplicity, and impressiveness. Cotman has grace and elegance, and a great distinc- tion of touch, and of arrangement of line and light and shade. He is above all things an architectural draughtsman. In etching, in colour, he understood admiraljly how to render the texture of stone and of masonry — the breadth of light ))laying upon carved surfaces. Among good examples of this power in the present collection is ' The Gateway of an Abbey, Aumale, Normandy' (80). ' Malines ' (.57) is another specimen of a large effect of light and of graceful detail. In the two water-colour drawings of ' Mont St. Michel ' (43, 48), the architectural draughtsman destroys the painter of nature. It is the grim fortress he paints — shorn of its romance. He has not expressed the possi- bilities of colour and of heavy massiveness belonging to the sea-girt pile, brooding on its height in the limpid softness of the morning light, and in the glow of the sunset. ' Framlingham Castle ' (-56), with grey towers group- ing themselves against the sunset sky, is happier in its effect, and has the charm lacking to the French draw- ing. A number of black-and-white studies hang on the walls of the Club, among which are several studies of trees— fir-trees darkling against the sky, trees lashed by the wind, trees growing by the water-side. Cot- man's sense of grace is here the dominant quality. He draws trees with a fine sense of their delicacy and dignity. A number, also, of etchings, chalk drawings, and water-colour sketches illustrate his love for nauti- cal things. Sailing-boats on the river and the sea, wherries and fishing-boats, cliff's and waves, were con- stant objects of delight and study to him. It must, nevertheless, be by his architectural draw- ings that Cotman is to be remembered. Many of these etchings appeared as illustrations to his friend Dawson Turner's antiquarian researches. The ruggedness and character of old buildings, of crumbling masonry, were never rendered with a finer and more sagacious touch. In Bohen's reproduction of architectural remains, etched by Cotman, his genius may be appreciated, hi his Liber •Sliidionim — a yet finer and more varied collection of etchings — may be still more fully seen the charm of elegance and grace that characterise liis touch and composition. Cotman was a born artist. He shaped his own destin}'. The son of a well-to-do Iinen-draj)er at Norwich, lie came up to London against paternal advice to study art. He never became an Academy student, but he knew Turner and Girton. The influ- ence of Turner's supreme genius, and of Girton's sober and poetic art, are apparent in his work.
It is sad to think that the life of this gentle master of an art which, if not the highest, is yet so true of its kind, was often depressed by monetary anxieties. His letters to his friend Dawson Turner, and to his father, often reveal the gloom that the goading touch of worry brought to his spirit. He spent much of his time in Norwich. He also lived for a while at Yarmouth, to be near Dawson Turner. Finally he settled in London in 1834, on his appointment as drawing-master at King's College School — an appointment secured to him by the great Turner's energetic partisanship in his favour. In the chapter of Mr. Wedmore's Studies in English Art devoted to Cotman, there are quotations from the artist's letters, where bright and fanciful moods alternate with those of profound melancholy and foreboding. The gloom deepens, until at last, in July 1842, Cotman died, aged sixty. The exhibition now at the Burlington Art Club gives a fair idea of the genius of one who, if not a great artist, was certainly a sincere one, and who never vulgarised the gifts with which nature had endowed him.
