Alexander Cozens

Alexander Cozens (1717, St. Petersburg–1786, London) was a British landscape painter in watercolours, a published teacher of painting, and father of John Robert Cozens.

Life

Alexander Cozens was said to be a natural son of emperor Peter I of Russia and a British woman — Mary Davenport — from Deptford. The legend says the czar took her to Russia, where Cozens was born, and had another son by her, who became a general in the Russian army. In fact, Alexander Cozens was son of Richard Cozens (1674–1735), who worked for Peter I as a shipbuilder. Alexander Cozens was sent to study painting in Italy, from where he travelled to Britain in 1746 or shortly after.

In 1760 he was among the contributors to the first public exhibition in London of works by living artists, which was held in the great room of the Society of Arts. The exhibition was organised by a body of artists who afterwards divided into the 'Free Society' and the 'Incorporated Society of Artists'. Cozens contributed to the exhibitions of both societies. In 1761 he obtained a prize from the Society of Arts at the exhibition in the Strand of the former, but he was one of the original members of the latter, incorporated in 1766. He also exhibited eight works at the Royal Academy between 1772 and 1781. He was mostly employed in teaching, was drawing-master at Eton college from 1763 to 1768, and gave lessons to the Prince of Wales, Sir George Beaumont, and William Beckford, who were to be arguably the three most important British art patrons and collectors of their generation. Beckford continued to correspond with him for some years. He also practised at Bath.

He married Juliet Pine, a sister of Robert Edge Pine and daughter of John Pine, Bluemantle Pursuivant in the College of Heralds (b. London, 1690, d. London 1756), by whom he left one son, John Robert Cozens and a daughter Juliet Cozens. He died in Duke Street, Piccadilly, 23 April 1786.

Cozens's art

Of Cozens's art before he came to Britain there were by the end of the nineteenth century, fifty-four specimens in the British Museum. These drawings, mostly if not all Italian scenes, had been lost by him in Germany on his way from Rome to Britain, and were recovered in Florence thirty years after wards (1776) by his son. They show him as a highly skilled draughtsman in the style of the time, with much sense of scenic elegance in 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. One, a view of Porto Longano in the Isle of Elba, is very prettily tinted. In most there is no sky to speak of, but in one he has attempted a bold effect of sunlight streaming through cloud, and brightly illuminating several distinct spots in the landscape. Several broad pencil drawings on greenish paper heightened with white are very effective. Altogether these show that Cozens before his arrival in Britain was a well-trained artist who observed nature for himself, and was not without poetical feeling. After his arrival in Britain he appears, from some drawings in the South Kensington Museum, to have adopted a much broader style, aiming at an imposing distribution of masses and large effects of light and shade.

Sir George Beaumont was his pupil at Eton, and so also was Henry Angelo, whose Reminiscences give a lively description of his peculiar method of teaching: 'Cozens 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 upon other paper, and by the exercise of his fertile imagination, and a certain degree of ingenious coaxing, converted into romantic rocks, woods, towers, steeples, cottages, rivers, fields, and waterfalls. Blue and grey blots formed the mountains, clouds, and skies'. An improvement on this plan was to splash the bottoms of earthenware plates with these blots, and to stamp impressions therefrom on sheets of damped paper'. In 1785 he 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" (1785–86). Joseph Wright of Derby was influenced by Cozens and owned his paintings using his ideas as inspiration for his compositions.

In 1778 Cozens published Principles of Beauty relative to the Human Head (a work 'of more ingenuity than value'), with nineteen engravings by Bartolozzi. The list of subscribers included William Beckford (father of Cozens' pupil William Thomas Beckford), Burke, Garrick, Flaxman, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and other men of culture. Thomas Banks exhibited in 1782 'Head of a Majestic Beauty, composed on Mr.Cozens's principles'. Cozens also published The various Species of Composition in Nature, and The Shape, Skeleton, and Foliage of Thirty-two Species of Trees, (1771, reprinted 1786).

See also

• John Robert Cozens

References

Attribution

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: "Cozens, Alexander". Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900.

Further reading

• C. A. Cramer, 'Alexander Cozen's 'New Method': the blot and general nature - painter', in The Art Bulletin; vol. 79, no. 1 (March 1997), 112-129.
• K. Sloan, Alexander and John Robert Cozens The Poetry of Landscape (1986)
• A. P. Oppe, Alexander and John Robert Cozens (1952)

External links

• Alexander Cozens online (artcyclopedia).
• Cozens, Alexander: A Blot: Tigers (c.1770-80) ("The Independent" - 13 April 2007).