The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (121 page)

(1783–1859).
English landscape painter, mainly in watercolour. In his youth he worked as a scene painter in Birmingham and London, where he received lessons from John
Varley
. He lived in Hereford, 1814–27, and in London, 1829–41, before retiring to Harborne, near Birmingham, from where he made annual sketching tours to the Welsh mountains. In spite of a certain anecdotal homeliness, his style was broad and vigorous, and in 1836 he began to paint on a rough Scottish wrapping paper that was particularly suited to it.
A similar paper was made commercially and marketed as ‘Cox Paper’. He wrote several treatises on landscape painting in watercolour, and in the last two decades of his life also worked quite frequently in oils.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

Coypel
.

Family of French painters of which
Noel
(1628–1707) was the head. He created a successful academic style on the example of
Poussin
and
Lebrun
, was much employed on the large decorative schemes of Louis XIV, notably at Versailles, and was director of the French Academy in Rome (1672–6) and then director of the Académie Royale in Paris (1695). His son
Antoine
(1661–1722) went to Rome as a child with his father and there is a strong Italian element in his style. This comes out particularly in his most famous work, the ceiling of the Chapel at Versailles (1708), which derived from
Baciccio's
ceiling in the Gesù in Rome. This and Coypel's decorations at the Palais Royal in Paris (1702, destroyed) rank as the two most completely
Baroque
schemes found in French art of this period. The Versailles ceiling is more successful than much of Coypel's work, which often combines, in the words of Anthony
Blunt
, ‘the bombast of the Baroque and the pedantry of the
classical
style without the virtues of either’. His half-brother
Noel-Nicolas
(1690–1734) painted with much more charm, mainly mythological subjects, but he seems to have had a rather timid personality and did not achieve the worldly success of the other members of the family. Indeed, he was the best painter of the family, but is the least famous.
Chardin
was briefly his assistant. Antoine's son
Charles-Antoine
(1694–1752) was a much more forceful character than Noel-Nicolas and had a resoundingly successful career, largely due to his administrative capacity in the various official positions that he held. In 1747 he became director of the Académie Royale and chief painter to the king. He also was an accomplished writer of verse and plays as well as art criticism. As a painter he was versatile and prolific, but the weakest member of the family; his
Supper at Emmaus
(1746) in Saint-Merry, Paris, has been described by Sir Michael Levey as ‘pathetically inept’.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

(1640–1720).
French sculptor, with
Girardon
the most successful of Louis XIV's reign. His style was more
Baroque
than Girardon's and Coysevox overtook his rival in popularity towards the end of the 17th cent. as the king's taste turned away from the
classical
. By 1679 Coysevox was working at Versailles, where he made numerous statues for the gardens and did much interior decoration, including a striking
relief
of Louis XIV in the Salon de la Guerre. His originality, however, is seen mostly in his portrait busts, which show a naturalism of conception and an animation of expression that look forward to the
Rococo
. This is particularly so with his portraits of friends, but even his formal commissions can be remarkably lively. The Wallace Collection, London, has an outstanding example of both his formal and informal portraits: the bronze
Louis XIV
(
c.
1686) and the terracotta
Charles Lebrun
(1676).

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

(1717–86).
English landscape draughtsman. He was born in Russia, the son of a shipbuilder employed by Peter the Great (it was rumoured that Peter was his real father) and did not settle in England until 1746. In 1785 or 1786 he published his famous treatise
A New Method of Assisting the Invention in Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape
, in which he explains his method of using accidental blots on the drawing paper to stimulate the imagination by suggesting landscape forms that could be developed into a finished work. Cozens mentions that ‘something of the same kind had been mentioned by
Leonardo
da Vinci, in his Treatise on Painting’ and that reading the passage in question ‘tended to confirm my own opinion’. He quotes Leonardo as saying ‘If you look upon an old wall covered with dirt, or the odd appearance of some streaked stones, you may discover several things like landscapes, battles, clouds, uncommon atittudes, humorous faces, draperies &c. Out of this confused mass of objects, the mind will be furnished with abundance of designs and subjects perfectly new.’ He worked almost exclusively in monochrome, and both his *‘
blot drawings
’ and his more formal compositions use intense lights and darks with masterly effect to suggest the power and mystery of nature. Cozens was the first major English artist to devote himself entirely to landscape, and he spent much of his career as a fashionable teacher.
His son,
John Robert Cozens
(1752–97), was also a landscape painter. Most of his work derived from two continental journeys in 1776–9 and 1782–3, during which he visited Italy and Switzerland. On the first he was probably draughtsman to Richard Payne
Knight
, and on the second he was part of the entourage of William
Beckford
(a former pupil of his father). In 1793 he became insane and was cared for by Dr
Monro
. Although his watercolours were based on sketches made on the spot, he by no means restricted himself to topographical exactitude and he often transposed landscape features in the interests of a more poetical composition. But he does not seem ever to have composed wholly from imagination, as his father did. His narrow but subtly gradated range of subdued colour is intensely evocative of the serene natural effects which appealed so strongly to his poetic melancholy. He was the most talented of the English landscape artists in the
Picturesque
tradition and his work was admired and copied by
Constable
(who called him ‘the greatest genius that ever touched landscape’),
Girtin
, and
Turner
.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search