Cotmania. Vol. VI. 1930-31

Extract from 'Father & Son' by Sir Edmund Gosse, 1907.
* [His father married again, a Miss Brightwen.]
"My stepmother brought a flavour of the fine arts with her;
a mind of aesthetic order, like that of lavender, cling to
her as she moved. She had known authentic artists in
her youth; she had watched Old Crome painting, and
had taken a course of drawing-lessons from no less a person
than Cotman. She painted small water-colour landscapes herself,
with a delicate economy of means and a graceful
Norwich convention; her sketch-books were filled with abbeys
gently washed in, river-banks in sepia by which the
elect might be dimly reminded of Libri Studiorum,
and woodland scenes over which the ghost of Creswick
had faintly breathed. It was not an exciting art, but it
was, as far as it went, in its ladylike reserve, the
real thing. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Then I began to acquire, without understanding
the value of it, some conception of the elegant phases of early
English water-colour painting, and there was one singular piece
of a marble well brimming with water, and a greyish-blue
sky over it, and dark-green poplars, shaped like wet
brooms, menacing the middle distance, which Cotman
himself had painted: & this seemed beautiful & curious to me
in its dim, flat frame, when it was hoisted to a place
on our drawing room wall."

*Miss Brightwen was a sister of Thomas Brightwen (1812-1870)
a partner in the Yarmouth Bank. He married Hannah Sarah Turner (1808-1882) in 1839.