FDA-D.157-2010

FDA-D.157-2010

drawing

Valley of Ober-Hasli (The Aare Gorge, Meiringen)
Pilkington

assigned by cataloguer
collection

Through his father, Alexander Cozens (1717-1786), John Robert Cozens has a special connection with Eton. Alexander Cozens, who was born in Russia, the son of an English shipbuilder to Czar Peter the Great, taught drawing at Eton in the 1760s. He worked from a room above a barber's shop in the town. Some twenty years earlier, Alexander provided the design for an 'East View of Eton College', engraved by John Pine and published in 1742, dedicated to the 'Provost and Fellows of the Royal College of Eton'. The imposing watercolour by John Robert Cozens shown here is the large, final version of his view of the Aare Gorge near Meiringen in Switzerland. Two smaller drawings of the subject are in the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Bacon Collection. In the Eton watercolour Cozens has exaggerated the height and barrenness of the limestone rocks; he has omitted nearly all the cliff-top vegetation and brought the sides of the gorge closer together. He has also inserted four small figures pulling a boat ashore in the foreground: these serve to emphasise the enormity of the rocks and the power of the water racing through the ravine. As a result of its unusual and striking geological formation , the Aare Gorge is characterised by contrasting patches of bright light and dark shade and by further contrasts between smooth and rugged rock faces. In the watercolour, the pale mass seen beyond the dark edges of the gorge is not falling water, as it might appear at first sight, but a wall of smooth rock, lit by reflected light. Cozens himself described how his effects were achieved in his manuscript 'Method of Tinting Landscapes' given to his pupil Thomas Sunderland. He says that 'the sky and extreme distance' should be 'done with colour and water alone' with rays of the sun (if appropriate) and 'effects of vapour' produced with an India rubber before a thin solution of Gum Arabic is applied to fix the colours. The remaining parts of the picture are laid in wtih Indian ink, with those nearest the eye a mixture of Indian ink with a little brown pigment. 'When the shades of the whole drawing are finished (and they must be strongly worked up,)' and the Indian ink washes fully dry, a variety of transparent coloured tints, using Lake, Prussian blue and Gamboge could be laid on top, beginning in the distance and working towards the foreground. 'Catching lights' should be created by the white of the paper.
The Aare Gorge was, and is, a well-known tourist destination. Cozens visited in 1776 (three years before Goethe made his way there), in the company of his young patron Richard Payne Knight, later a well-known writer on the Picturesque. The Eton picture is dated 1778 and must have been drawn in Rome, where the artist remained until April 1779. Another large Swiss subject by Cozens, 'Near Chiavenna in the Grisons'. now in the Yale Center for British Art, is a similarly dramatic composition that focuses on unforgiving rocks and treeless mountainsides. Andrew Wilton's observations on that picture are equally applicable to the 'Valley of the Ober-Hasli': he notes that in developing his watercolour from smaller studies, Cozens 'altered the forms of the rocks in a highly idiosyncratic way, giving them angular shapes strongly reminiscent of his father's work. The composition could indeed be one of Alexander's abstract fantasies...'.
Cozens travelled through Switzerland for the first time in August 1776, in the company of the young classical scholar and future connoisseur Richard Payne Knight. More than fifty washed drawings record their progress through the Alps, probably worked up from slight sketches made on the spot. The prototype for Cat. 47 is a drawing now in the Fitzwilliams Museum, Cambridge, numbered '31'. The Eton watercolour is dated 1778, and was presumably painted on commission for an unknow Grand Tourist while Cozens was in Rome, where he remained until 1779. The notably rugged treatment of the bare rock faces, and the illusory quality of the furthest bare cliff glimpsed through the gorge, which looks like ice, or even glass, are in marked contrast to the often sun-bathed vistas Cozens was then sketching on the outskirts of Rome. Here, he does away with every suggestion of vegetation (omitting the small fir trees present in the sketch and in another watercolour version now in the Bacon Collection), leaving only a mass of tangled branches and the pull of the boat in the river as indications of the overwhelming power of the natural forces at work in this inhospitable landscape.

Pi 244

height (actual size): 474mm
width (actual size): 351mm

Inscribed, verso, 'In the Canton of Bern / Switzerland / J R. Cozens 1778'

Indian ink and watercolour over traces of pencil; watermark 'J WHATMAN'

Cozens, John Robert, 1752 - 1797 (Artist)

1778

Provenance: Collection of Mrs Dawbarn[?]; sold through Sotheby's on 31st July 1946 (Lot 58); with The Fine Art Society; collection of Alan Pilkington; by whom bequeathed to Eton College in 1973

Exhibited: 'A Genius for Watercolour', Christie’s, London, 6 to 24 January 2003, catalogue number 47; 'Watercolours from the Eton College Collections', Verey Gallery, Eton College, 24 November 2018 to 24 February 2019; 'Humphrey Ocean: Fresh as Paint', The Verey Gallery, Eton College, 9 June to 30 October 2022, catalogue number 3

Pilkington, Alan, 1879 - 1973: Bequeathed to Eton by Alan Pilkington, 1973
Dawbarn, Mrs: ? Mrs Dawbarn; with Sotheby's 31st July 1946 (lot 58); with The Fine Art Society

• Ryan, H., Hidden Treasures, W.S. Fine Art exhibition catalogue, 2010 (p. 28, no 9)
• Wilcox, T., A Genius for Watercolour; Watercolours from the Eton College Collection, Christie's exhibition catalogue, London, 2003 (pp. 56-57, no. 47)
• Quarrie, P., Treasures of Eton College Library: 550 years of collecting, Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, 1990 (pp. 112-113, no. 226)
• Sloane, K., Alexander and John Robert Cozens: The Poetry of Landscape, New Haven & London, 1986 (p. 122, no. 135)
• Pilkington, A., Loan exhibition of early English watercolours, drawings by Old Masters, etchings & engravings from the collection of Alan D. Pilkington: in aid of the Distressed Gentlefolk's Aid Association, Colnaghi & Co, London, 1958 (no. 44)
• Bell, C.F. & Girtin, T., 'The drawings and sketches of J.R. Cozens', Walpole Society XXXIII, 1934-5, cat. 28Aiii