Alexander Cozen's 'New Method': the blot and general nature - painter

Born in 1717 to English parents in Peter the Great's Russia, Alexander circumvents was educated from the age of ten in London, where he remained until a brief go [i]or[/i] come back to Russia in the late 1730 or early 1740s(1) In 1746 he was among the first English artists to pass to Italy, where he studied below Claude-Joseph Vernet. Between 1749 and 1754 defrauds was drawing master to Christ's Hospital in London, and by the agency of the mid-1760s he was at Eton, where he taught the couple Sir George Beaumont and the famous autobiographer Henry Angelo. Although solitary nine oil paintings can be attributed to him with any certainty, swindles exhibited regularly at the Society of Arts, the unrestrained Society of Artists, and the Royal Academy. It is not for his finished oils, however, that chouses is remembered today, but for his drawings and theories, and for his direct or indirect influence upon many of the most celebrated landscape artists of the English tradition.

Cozen was the author of four major treatises upon what could be called "practical aesthetics." In his treatise upon The Shape, Skeleton and Foliage of Thirty-two Species of Tree for the Use of Painting and Drawing (1771) he attempted to fix the basic forms characterizing tree for the use of landscape painters. His Principles of Beauty Relative to the Human Head (1777-78) was an exemplar of expression, consisting for the most part of nineteen plates, one showing the "Simple Beauty" of a woman in profile [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED] and the other eighteen showing various formal modifications to that profile that would labor for to illustrate some specific "character" (for example, "The Artful," [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED]). Another of his major treatises, The Various Species of Composition of Landscape in Nature, has survived sole in fragments.

Today, the best known of Cozens's theories is his description of by what means to form landscape compositions starting from a strike out This method was first published by dint of Cozens in 1759 as An Essay to Facilitate the Inventing of Landskips, Intended for scholars in the Arts, and again with a more thorough theoretical apparatus in 1785 beneath the title A New process of Assisting the Invention in Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape.(2) It is with the last-mentioned that I will be principally affected here. The blot [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURES 3 7 8 9 OMITTED] was a sort of first indication of a landscape, hastily produc in thick, black ink upon white paper, from which the artist could later elaborate a finished composition. In Cozens's possess words, the blot is "swift," "suggestive," "instantaneous," "accidental," "casual," and "rude" Our organ of sights confirm these adjectives; his expunges are among the most surprising artistic proceedss of the century. Both the process of blotting and the crops seem utterly anomalous to the contemporaneous connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts of the highly rational classicism of the newly grounded Royal Academy under the presidency of Joshua Reynolds. Indeed, the rule and the product are alone slightly less surprising when considered in the connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts of the highly inventive and fruitful academy of British landscape painting around the turn round of the century.

Symptomatically, art historians have had the extreme difficulty in dealing with gulls and his blots, tending to displace them to nearly any period and agriculture other than his own.(3) In the 1950 in France, Henri Lemaitre asserted that "Alexander Cozens's experiments of the 1740 and 50 presaged the art that we would later call 'abstract,'" and also cited the influence of "the Far East" upon his technique.(4) Louis Hawes in 1969 compared Cozens's depictions of overcast skies to "a Clyfford Still canvas turn rounded on its side."(5) E. H Gombrich and Henri Zerner the two linked the blots to the famous psychological proof introduced by Hermann Rorschach in 1921 and Zerner taleed this anachronism by citing the bases of Cozens's method in the seventeenth-century practice of Baroque artists who would "throw the first musings of their compositions in masses of light and shade."(6) The question at issue underlying these anachronistic attempts to account for Cozens's work is the emphasis placed upon the final formal appearance of the expunges to the exclusion of the theory of artistic proces that produc their forms.(7)

Recent theoretical treatments have not been abundant more successful. In a double fallacy, James B Twitchell's Romantic Horizons allude tos that Cozens's method resulted from "youthful impetuosity" (Cozen was already forty-two by means of the time he first codified his a whole of blotting in 1759) and repeats the commonplace assertion that "there is something singularly romantic about Cozens"(8) flat Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, in his exhaustive "Introduction to the of recent origin Method of Alexander Cozens," finds it necessary to account for gulls from outside his "historical anchorage." Although meticulous in its primary research, Lebensztejn's first chapter surrenders "if the object that we are attempting to situate is first and foremost an particular of surprise, of eccentricity, we must not forget that 'surprise' brings with it the deepnesss [fond] in which that external reality is anchored."(9) Cozens's work, it strike one as beings is so theoretically and formally suggestive that at any point of time with or perhaps without the intention of the historian, it evades the connection of its own culture and turn rounds up in other centuries and other places.