|
|
Augusta Stylianou Gallery 
John Robert Cozens (1752 – 14 December 1797) was an English draftsman and painter of romantic watercolour landscapes. John Robert Cozens Paintings
Lake Albano with Castel Gandolfo, Sunset
Lake Nemi with the city of Genzano The son of the Russian-born drawing master and watercolorist, Alexander Cozens, John Robert Cozens was born in London. He studied under his father and began to exhibit some early drawings with the Society of Artists in 1767. In 1776, he displayed a large oil painting at the Royal Academy in London. 1776-79 he spent some time in Switzerland and Italy, where he drew Alpine and Italian views. In 1779 he went back to London. In 1782, he made his second visit to Italy, accompanied by the author William Beckford, spending much time at Naples. In 1783, he returned to England. In 1789, he published a set of Delineations of the General Character ... of Forest Trees. He submitted his work to the Royal Academy but it was entirely rejected, being judged as "not proper art". At the age of 42, three years before he died, he suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to the Bethlem Royal Hospital asylum. The chief physician there was Dr. Thomas Monro who, also being a keen art collector, recognised Cozen's brilliance and bought his collection. Couzens died in London. Cozens executed watercolors in curious atmospherical effects and illusions which had some influence on Thomas Girtin and J.M.W. Turner. Indeed, his work is full of poetry. There is a solemn grandeur in his Alpine views and a sense of vastness, a tender tranquillity and a kind of mystery in most of his paintings, leaving parts in his pictures for the imagination of the spectator to dwell on and search into. John Constable called him "the greatest genius that ever touched landscape." On the other hand, Cozens never departed from his primitive, almost rudimentary, manner of painting, which causes several of his works to look very like colored engravings. In June 2010 Cozen's Lake Albano (c.1777) sold, at auction at Sotheby's in London, for £2.4 million, a record for any 18th-century British watercolour.[1] References 1. ^ British watercolour sales sets new records at telegraph.co.uk Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/ ", Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License ==--==--==
|
==++==++== |
