Stop and Look – Greta Bridge by John Sell Cotman’s (1805)
The other week I wrote about the subtly calculated perfection of the seventeenth-century French master Claude Lorrain’s “ideal” landscape. Here’s quite another way to calculate the content of a landscape composition.
The result is about as far from Claude as you can get, but it possesses the same certainty, a conviction derived from the absolute assurance with which the landscape elements are assembled. Taken individually, those elements are oddly unsatisfying: random shapes of rock or foliage deployed round the one unambiguous form in the design: the pure arch of the bridge which is the principal subject of the picture.
Although it’s a beautifully drawn curve at the centre of the view, we realise as we look that the curve is made apparent to us not so much as a line, but as a juxtaposition of light and dark. Indeed, the whole arrangement of shapes in Cotman’s design is a gamut of tones ranging from the white of the most brilliant reflection of sky to the near-black of the rocks close by. Many decades later in the nineteenth century, this sophisticated organisation of shapes and colours might have been called a ‘symphony’: the artist’s treatment of the landscape subject is presented as an aesthetic experience in its own right.
Our eye is drawn back again and again to that clear, pure curve of the arch, with its hypnotic perfection. We become aware of an interesting tension between the tones that define it and the implied line of the stonework – the architecture of the bridge itself. We find ourselves asking: which is more important – the line or the contrasting tones? We now see that we can read the whole picture as a construction of very clearly drawn lines: the nebulous masses of the trees are somehow conveyed by outlines – outlines defined by those juxtapositions of tone and colour. And when we come to consider the colour, that too, we see, is unexpectedly subtle – so subtle that we had hardly noticed it: ochres, khakis, grey-greens, with touches of brown and blue; nothing strident or emphatic – though the bridge calmly dominates, as Cotman intended it to.
Cotman is one of the greatest of landscape artists, a celebrated master not only of the Norwich School to which he belonged but of the whole of Romantic landscape painting; yet he is rarely accorded the acknowledgement he deserves. He was able to conceive pictures of nature that owe nothing to Claude or indeed any earlier master, yet derive their authority from an innate Classicism we can detect in the artist’s temperament, a Classicism that links him not perhaps to Claude but to Claude’s contemporary, Poussin.
But for all his manipulation of reality, Cotman shows us a real place: the Greta is a river in north Yorkshire, where the twenty-three-year-old artist was earning his living teaching the children of a local landowner to draw. Was the clarity and precision of his technique a consequence of his need to create models that young people could copy or emulate? He spent much of his life teaching and we might read all his lucid designs as exquisitely disciplined experiments in communication by means of controlled draughtsmanship and the laying-on of immaculate washes of colour.
The miracle is that they are also visual poems of a high order; and his idiosyncratic vision anticipates not only aestheticism but even some of the ideas of twentieth-century abstraction. The fact that most of his important work was executed in watercolour may partly explain his relative neglect. But we are proud of our watercolour school, so let’s hear it for Cotman, who is one of its supreme masters.