Cotmania. Vol. III. 1928-9

The Connoisseur, March. 1929.

{Clipping}
Our Plates
When John Sell Cotman died at the age of sixty, in 1842, Tom Collier was a little more than two years old. In this issue, both men are represented by works which, though superficially similar in theme, serve interestingly to demonstrate the differences in outlook ad technique which had sprung up in the course of a generation or so. Cotman's noble water-colour, Cader Idris, from Barmouth Sands, possesses all the largeness in design, fine flatness of treatment, and magnificent certainty of expression which we are accustomed to associate with his best work. Collier's A Path Over the Fields, while also marked by assurance, is in all other respects, a completely different conception. Composed rather that designed, it is concerned principally by atmospheric effect; the handling is free to blottesqueness, conveying an impression of breezy movement quite alien to the static qualities of Cotman's Cader Idris. Collier was forty-one when he painted A Path Over the Fields, and had for some years belonged to what is now the Royal Institute of Painters in Water-Colours; he died in 1891, just ten years after the date on this characteristic drawing. Like the Cotman, the latter forms part of Mr F J Nettlefold's collection, some other treasures in which have been previously reproduced in The Conoisseur.

{Kitson's diary}
April 2. Johnwood Kay came in the morning, & looked thro' the Cotman drawings. He was very interested in the 'Norfolk Broads' sepia, & in the 'Study of trees' - both of which he was inclined to accept. He told me that Mrs Barker of Woodbridge had quantities of Cotman letters, which he had transcribed. He also told me of a Mrs Mitchell,
The Crossways (near Chelmsford), Danbury, Essex, who has Early Cotman (1800 or 1801?) portrait drawings in the back of a 'History of Bristol'.
He thought the Somersetshire drawings mostly the work of Bulwer.
He left after lunch on the 3rd - taking all my card index catalogues with him.