The Higgins Bedford’s first post-lockdown exhibition, Under the Same Sky, celebrates the impact of weather on a range of watercolours, drawings and prints from our internationally renowned art collection.
Drawn by John Sell Cotman (1782-1842) at a sketching club called ‘The Brothers’, Cain and Abel (c. 1800-3) encapsulates the Romantic leanings of many artists at the turn of the 19th century. Its startlingly luminous skyscape and horrifying high drama make it one of the more action-packed works to feature in the exhibition.
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| John Sell Cotman (1782-1842), Cain and Abel, c.1800-3 © Trustees of the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery (The Higgins Bedford) |
Born in Norwich in 1782 to a family of silk and lace traders, a young Cotman was pressured by his father to join the family business. However, intent on a career in landscape painting, he moved to London in 1798, aged just 16, in search of better training and patronage. It is in the capital that he discovered ‘The Brothers’. Founded by a group of eminent landscape artists, notably Thomas Girtin (1775-1802) and Louis Francia (1772-1839), they would meet at each other’s houses, set a literary source, and draw scenes from it. By routinely practising subjects of history painting, ‘The Brothers’ were training themselves to increase their chances of success in the Royal Academy.
Much like its European equivalents, the Academy taught according to a hierarchy that ranked the genres of painting by their prestige and cultural value. History painting sat at the top of the hierarchy, unanimously considered the most scholarly and technically demanding. Landscape, meanwhile, was one of the least esteemed, sometimes thought of as mere topographical training exercise. Cotman and his peers thus sought to elevate the status of landscapes, by practising a new style of them that blended literary narratives into views of natural scenic beauty. Francia confirms this in his written declaration of the club’s purpose: to ‘[establish] by practice a School of Historic Landscape, the subjects being designs of poetick passages.’
Many of ‘The Brothers’, including Cotman, were already training or exhibiting in the Academy, and so used the club to render their repertoire of artistic subjects and techniques more suited to Academy practice. ‘Brothers’ aspiring to become Academy members may have attended to practise figure composition, as mastery of this was a fundamental requirement to qualify for the Academy; artists who only painted landscapes were ineligible to join.
This does not mean, however, that there was no place for landscapes in the Academy; its first president, Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792), believed that a great painting does not necessarily imitate nature, but instead provokes the viewer’s emotions through drama and grandeur. He included landscapes in this discussion, claiming in his Discourses on Art that ‘a landscape […] conducted under the influence of a poetic mind […] would make a more forcible impression on the mind than the real scenes’.
Cain and Abel exemplifies how ‘The Brothers’ and their ‘School of Historic Landscape’, consciously tried to adopt Reynolds’ artistic philosophy. Cotman embraces his own ‘poetic mind’ to capture the denouement of this old-testament story in which Cain faces God’s wrath for killing his brother in a jealous rage. He abides by Reynolds’ instructions on how to achieve dramatic effect: ‘by reducing the colours to little more than chiaroscuro’ – the effect of contrasting dark and light tones. The chiaroscuro on the figures emphasises the innocent, pale lifelessness of Abel, and accentuates the symbolic shadow cast over his doomed brother, who awaits his condemnation to a life as a ‘fugitive and wanderer’.
Despite having to draw from the Bible, which contains little description of natural scenery, Cotman uses his Romantic imagination to depict a sky that narrates the story for him. He sets the figures against a minimalistic landscape, theatrically illuminated through more chiaroscuro. Most striking in this backdrop are the bright, powerful lightning bolts to symbolize God’s anger; a motif commonly used in other Bible passages, borrowed here to communicate an idea that is not visually represented in the story’s original text.
Under the Same Sky also features Cotman’s Mountain-Bordered Lake (c. 1802), in which he similarly contrasts dark and light shades in his mountainous background. He also applies his main rule for depicting nature: ‘to leave out but to add nothing’. This is, according to the Dictionary of National Biography, ‘to the sacrifice of detail but to the enhancement of the general effect’, and underpins his affinity to the Romantic movement led by J.M.W. Turner and John Constable.
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| John Sell Cotman (1782-1842), Mountain-Bordered Lake, c.1802 © Trustees of the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery (The Higgins Bedford) |
In his lifetime, Cotman would go on to achieve some success as a watercolourist and draughtsman, but was not considered a great artist. This reputation, however, has immensely improved over time. The DNB, written in 1885, describes him as ‘one of the most original and versatile painters’ of the first half of the 19th century. He continued to receive recognition from future generations; his modernised aesthetic inspired landscape artists from the 1920s such as Paul Nash and Eric Ravilious.
See Cotman’s works, alongside those of Girtin, Turner and Ravilious in Under the Same Sky, open now until 11th April 2021.
Written by Tom MacKinnon, Curatorial Volunteer
Bibliography:
Published texts:
Binyon, L., English Water Colours, (A&C Black Ltd., 1933)
Binyon, L., John Sell Cotman and John Crome, (London, Seeley & co., 1897)
Rajnai, M., John Sell Cotman, (Herbert, 1982)
Stephen, L., National Dictionary of Biography: Vol, XII: Conder-Craigie, (New York Macmillan & co., 1885)
Winter, D. Girtin's Sketching Club (Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 2, 1974) pp. 123-149.
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