RCEWA – The Lake of Albano and Castel Gandolfo by John Robert Cozens

Statement of the Expert Adviser to the Secretary of State that the watercolour meets Waverley criteria two and three.

Further Information

The ‘Note of Case History’ is available on the Arts Council Website: www.artscouncil.org.uk/reviewing-committee-case-hearings

Please note that images and appendices referenced are not reproduced.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

1. Brief Description of item

John Robert Cozens (1752-97), The Lake of Albano and Castel Gandolfo, c. 1785. Watercolour. 433 x 620 mm.

Thomas Lawrence’s monogram collector’s mark lower left, TL (Lugt 2445).

Condition: Generally good, as recently conserved; some evidence of touching up to small areas of damage/scratches in sky above trees to left

This view of and Castel Gandolfo bore the subtitle ‘Sunset’ when it was in the Girtin collection. The dramatic yellow sky on the left is slowly overtaken by the falling night clouds above, casting dark shadows on the wooded slopes of the ancient volcanic crater and depths of the placid lake below, the evening fires and smoke rising from the Campagna and in the distance beyond slowly eclipsing the light and adding to the mood of melancholy introspection.

2. Context

• Provenance: Sir Thomas Lawrence, PRA; his sale Christie’s 20-21 May 1830 (first day, lot 45; ‘The Lake of Albano’), bt. Colnaghi, 1.2s.6d.; bt. c. 1858? by G.W.H. Girtin? (catalogued as ‘Lake Albano with Castel Gandolfo. Sunset’); by descent to (1874-1960) (author with C F Bell of JRC catalogue raisonné); to his son Tom Girtin (1913-91); his sale, Sotheby’s 14 November 1991 (104) (£179,131 record for the artist); bt. Ian Craft; his sale Sotheby’s 14 July 2010 (60) (£500,000 – £700,000 est., £2,393,250 paid, record for any 18th century British watercolour)

• Comparable prices: Previous record for the artist: Cetara, Gulf of Salerno, , Christie’s November 2004 (to NG Washington) £240,000; for British watercolours: Blue Rigi Turner 2006 £4,950,000 (now Tate, with £500,00 from Art Fund); Lake of Lucerne, Turner, Sotheby’s 4 July 2018 £2,000,000; Girtin’s Jedburgh Abbey, auction records for that artist in 1990 at £290,000 and £470,000 in 2002; Turner Heidelberg with a rainbow record for the artist at the time, £2,038,500 Sotheby’s 2001.

• Key literary references: F. Gibson, ‘The Art of Alexander and John Robert Cozens’, The Studio, Feb. 1917, 14, repr. 17

L. Binyon, English Watercolours, 1933, 48

C.F. Bell & T. Girtin, ‘The Drawings and Sketches of John Robert Cozens’ Walpole Society, 1935, no. 149 (C)

A. P. Oppé, Alexander and John Robert Cozens, 1952, 125, n.1, 148-9.

T. Girtin and D. Loshak, The Art of Thomas Girtin, 1954, fig. 3

H. Lemaitre, Le Paysage Anglais a l’Aquarelle, 1955, pl. 10

Andrew Wilton, The Art of Alexander and John Robert Cozens, Yale Center for British Art, 1980, 41-2 K. Sloan, Alexander and John Robert Cozens: The Poetry of Landscape, 1986, 129.

K. Sloan, ‘”Surpassing the others in Prospect and Situation”’: Six Watercolours by John Robert Cozens’ in S. Wilcox and M.D. Sanchez-Jauregui, eds., The English Prize: The Capture of the Westmorland, An Episode of the Grand Tour, 2012, 115-25.

• Key exhibition references: London, Burlington Fine Arts Club, 1871, no. 87 and 1923, no. 62 (pl. XXXVIII)

(Summary references: Norwich, Loan Collection, 1903; London, Grafton Galleries, Old Masters, 1911; RA, British Art, 1934; Manchester, Whitworth, 1937; Yale University Art Gallery, 1950; Sheffield, Girtin Collection, 1953; Manchester, Whitworth, Alexander and J R Cozens, 1956; Leeds, English Watercolours, 1958; Rome, British Council, 18th c. in Rome, 1959; Reading, Girtin and contemporaries, 1969)

Manchester, Whitworth and London, V&A, John Robert Cozens, 1971, no. 32

Manchester, Whitworth Art Gallery, Exhibition of Watercolour Drawings by J.R. Cozens and J.S. Cotman, 1973, no. 72

London, Royal Academy, The Great Age of British Watercolours, 15 January-11 April 1993, no. 93, pl. 34 (where titled Lake Albano and Castel Gandolfo – Sunset and dated c. 1790)

3. Waverley criteria

• 2: Aesthetic: Outstanding aesthetic importance as a bravura performance of a romantic landscape watercolour that is unmatched during the 18th century for evoking the sensibilities, atmosphere and memories of one of the most iconic views of the Grand Tour

• 3: Scholarship: Outstanding significance for the study of the work of Alexander and John Robert Cozens, the development of the national school of watercolour in Britain, the beginnings of British Romanticism in landscape, and understanding the work of Girtin, Turner, Constable and many later 20th century British artists.

DETAILED CASE

This glorious, atmospheric view of Lake Albano and the Castel Gandolfo is arguably John Robert Cozens’s masterpiece and the most evocatively beautiful watercolour produced in the 18th century. A bust of John Robert Cozens (1752-1797) is the second in the run of eight portraits on the front of the Royal Institute of the Painters in Water Colours on Piccadilly. He is next to the ‘father’ of the school Paul Sandby and is followed by Girtin, Turner, and Cox. Cozens is still recognized as the greatest, most innovative and evocative watercolourist of the 18th century and good examples of his work that come up for sale reflect the value that collectors and scholars place upon his work. Those who know British watercolours are passionate about his work and cognisant of the vital role it played in the creation of the Romantic vision of landscape found in the work of Turner, Girtin and Constable. In his monumental history of British watercolours Martin Hardie noted: ‘It isn’t easy to analyse precisely the qualities of Cozens’s work which roused, and still rouse, such enthusiasm. They are of the spirit, and seldom has any artist succeeded with such subtlety and delicacy in evoking the spirit and sentiment of a scene’.

Cozens was admired during his own lifetime and shortly after his death Fuseli wrote that he ‘followed the arrangements of nature which he saw with an enchanted eye and drew with an enchanted hand’. Constable thought he was ‘all poetry’ and ‘the greatest genius that ever touched landscape.’ Examples of Cozens’s watercolours have been noted and admired in exhibitions that are surveys of British watercolour (such as the exhibition at the RA in 1993, the last time this was shown in public apart from its sale) but his work is due for a reappraisal and several institutions and scholars are considering a monographic exhibition in the next few years, where this watercolour would certainly head the list of desiderata.

The motif of the papal summer residence on the edge of this most famous lake in the Colli Albani, with its view of the eternal city and coast beyond, seen from the rim of the crater, was a motif that Cozens returned to again and again in his work, from the first visit in 1776 to repeated versions through the late 1770s, 80s and possibly into the early 1790s. He painted it with sweeping trees overhanging the lake from the left, with goatherds hurrying along (two examples at Yale, one AGO, one Tate, Fitzwilliam, Whitworth) and with a screen of umbrella pines (Leeds) and several others. With his view of Lake , it was the favourite pair to request versions of during his own time. For those who had been on the Grand Tour, they evoked what Addison described as the ‘Magick Land’ of the to the south of Rome, replete with memories of the myths and history of classical authors. Many of the other versions become formulaic, even mannered, but this one, with its focus on the sky over an uninterrupted sweep of the undulations of the crater’s edge is without doubt the finest and the most moving, even deeply personal. Cozens’s devotion to quiet solitude and his almost melancholic nature were well known in his lifetime but its relationship to his mental illness from 1794 when he was placed in the care of Dr Monro is the stuff of speculation.

Cozens had been steeped almost since his birth in methods to manipulate landscape composition to create visions of sense and meaning. From at least 1759, his father Alexander had devised, published and refined systems for creating imaginative landscapes that could evoke emotions and ideas such as surprise, terror, safety, delight, shade, coolness, quiet, public happiness, the progress of liberty and melancholy power and strength. Apart from a few topographical views in his early career, Alexander always painted imaginative landscapes, composed of elements, where the sky and the tones assisted in creating the effects; John Robert absorbed the ideas but not the methods and with his unique and exceptionally skilled handling of touches and washes of colour, laid onto the faintest of pencil sketches, created images that were based on pencil and wash sketches of real views, but altered by handling, colour, tone, clouds, sky and the shape of trees to evoke moods, experiences and feelings that had been aroused when immersed in the actual landscape. Manipulating broad washes of yellow (gamboge and saffron were colours he recommended to a pupil), Prussian blue and India ink, and faint touches of brown and occasionally lake (red), and india rubber for vapours and the sun, he mixed and applied faint washes and deeper colours in layers and tones in a way that no other 18th century watercolourist could manage and that Turner and Girtin were to study carefully and try to emulate. This watercolour, probably produced in the late 1780s, is the culmination of the development of this technique and the effects it could achieve.

The drawing was not included in the last monographic show on Cozens held at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto in 1986 but this was because the show’s curator, Kim Sloan, only included Cozens’s works she had seen and studied. At that stage she knew the Girtin family collection only through small grainy black and white reproductions. This watercolour had last been seen in public in 1973 but if she had seen it, it would certainly have been included as a centre piece.

It was presumably during conservation after the drawing’s purchase in 1991 that Thomas Lawrence’s stamp was discovered in the lower left of the watercolour. The watercolour would originally have been on the artist’s own typical wash line mount but it is not clear when that was removed. The story of the nation failing to buy Lawrence’s collection of Old Master prints and drawings in 1830 (which included the entire contents of William Young Ottley’s collection) is a famous and notorious one but what is less well known is that his collection included a large number (probably around 1,000) British 18th and early 19th century drawings and watercolours. They included works by Cosway, Rowlandson, Gainsborough, Wilson, Flaxman, etc. and five watercolour landscapes by John Robert Cozens. Four of these had previously belonged to William Beckford (sale 1805) but only one had been recorded with its Lawrence provenance (Temples at Paestum). The views of the Bay of , Port of Vietri and Madama that had belonged to Beckford were all of a similar size but the Lake of Albano was not from Beckford’s collection and was noted in Lawrence’s sale as ‘large’. The research on how and when he acquired it is still to be done (Lawrence’s name was not among those who contributed to Cozens’s care in the 1790s). The Girtin collection, formed by the descendants of the artist Thomas Girtin (d.1802) is fairly well documented (through a 1938 typescript catalogue of the collection and the family archive now in BM P&D) but again the research and analysis of this large and very important collection has also not yet begun, apart, of course, from the works by Girtin. The archive indicates this watercolour by Cozens was in the Girtin collection by around the middle of the 19th century. It included a selection of eleven other works by Cozens and some of the best of Girtin and Turner’s works, and it is worth noting that when the collection was valued (there are pencil annotations of the values in the margins of the typescript catalogue), this watercolour was valued higher than any of the magnificent works by Girtin and Turner in the collection.

This work has twice reached a record-breaking price, a price very seldom reached by even the best Turner watercolours. It is widely regarded as one of Cozens’s finest, most evocative, deeply romantic watercolours and probably the greatest British watercolour of the 18th century.