The Cotman Collection | 59

Cotmania. Vol. III. 1928-9

Archive: SDK Sydney Decimus Kitson Archive
Reference Number: SDK/1/2/1/3
Page: 18 verso


  • Description

    Clipping of review of the Victoria and Albert Museum's principal acquisitions of 1927, including a few portraits and 'Interior of Crosby Hall' by Cotman

    Clipping of review of the Victoria and Albert Museum's principal acquisitions of 1927, including a few portraits and 'Interior of Crosby Hall' by Cotman

    Date: 1927

  • Transcription

    V & A MUSEUM.
    Review of the principal acquisitions during the year 1927

    PORTRAIT DRAWINGS. One of the most interesting acquisitions during the year was "A Collection of Original Portraits, 1819: Collected by Dawson Turner, FRS (1775-1858)." Dawson Turner was the well-known Norfolk botanist and anitquary, one of whose chief claims to remembrance is his steadfast support and appreciation of John Sell Cotman. Vol. I contains forty-one drawings and one soft ground etching, mostly portraits of relatives of the collector or of eminent people, probably his personal friends. The drawings served as the basis of many etchings by Mrs. Dawson Turner amd her daughters, some of which are included in "The Mother's Exemplar," now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and "One Hundred Etchings," by Mrs. Dawson Turner, now in the British Museum. Below each portrait is generally written in ink the name of the artist, the date and the name of the subject, and thses inscriptions, as well as the title-page and the list of subjects following the title-page, appear to have been written by the same hand, possibly a member of the Tuner family. The binding is of crimson crushed morocco, with gold tooling, and on the front cover is an oval with a crest, motto and monogram of Dawson Turner.
    Some of these portraits are of great interest and are from such famous hands as Chantry, J.S.Cotman, Ozias Humphrey, and R. R. Reinagle. Of the subjects, many are artists. J. S. Cotman os seen in a portrait by J. P. Davis (plate 21), as are also Benjamin Robert Haydon and the great Talma. There are by Mrs Dawson Turner numerous portraits of the Palgrave family, she herself having borne that name before her marriage. There are also portraits of Anne Pitt, sister of the Earl of Chatham, Captain George William Manby, Thomas William Coke, Earl of Leicester, Hudson Gurney, and Sir Henry Charles Englefield.
    A second volume was completed in 1825, and this contains sixty-nine portraits similar in character to those of the volume already described, and is in a uniform binding. The inscriptions in the book are in the same hand as those in the first volume, and it contains, in addition to further examples of the work of most of the artists mentioned above, drawings by, or after, Sir C. L. Eastlake, E. H. Langlois, G. R. Lewis, J. Stephanoff, and John Varley.
    The most important purchase in the field of water-colour was that of a large drawing by John Sell Cotman (1782-1842) of the 'Interior of Crosby Hall' (plate 26), a romantic treatment of the subject, painted at a time when the old building was in use as a warehouse. The drawing is of some interest topographical, as it shows Crosby Hall long before its comparatively recent removal to Chelsea, where it now stands. It was executed in 1831, and is a replica of a slightly smaller drawing, made in 1830; the latter was lent by Mr J .J. Colman, M.P., to an exhibition held at the Norwich Art Circle in 1888, and is reproduced in the catalogue. This important work, formerly in the Bulwer Collection, illustrates a subject and a period in Cotman's career not hitherto represented in the Museum's collection. The romantic feeling in this drawing, which is enhanced by splashes of green and red colour in the centre, may be due to the ambient atmosphere of the period, to which a sensitive artist like Cotman cannot have remained impervious. One may, however, wonder whether it does not show traces of French influence, deriving from the Bonnington-Delacroix group, with whose work Cotman may have become acquainted when he was in France in 1817, 1818 and 1820, or later in England, for Delacroix came over in 1825.

Clipping of review of the Victoria and Albert Museum's principal acquisitions of 1927, including a few portraits and 'Interior of Crosby Hall' by Cotman