Neoclassicism and Romanticism

 

(Neoclassicism, Romanticism and Art Styles in 19th century - Art Map)



 

Alexander Cozens



 

Alexander Cozens

(b Russia, 1717; d London, 23 April 1786).

Painter, drawing-master and theorist. His early years were spent in St Petersburg, where his father, Richard, originally from Deptford, was a master shipbuilder to Peter the Great. Educated in England from 1727, Cozens was studying painting in London in 1735, but in the early 1740s he appears to have returned to Russia, where he worked on improving his topographical skills. In 1746 he sailed from St Petersburg to Livorno and studied in Italy for two years. His work there consisted mainly of pencil sketches of landscape, detailed pen-and-ink drawings and washed views made around Rome and along the Ligurian coast. In Rome he studied oil painting in the studio of Claude-Joseph Vernet, whose influence can be seen not only in Cozens’s later oils but also in some of the landscapes drawn from nature during his time there. A surviving Roman sketchbook (New Haven, CT, Yale Cent. Brit. A.) shows the first evidence of his passion for devising and listing methods for drawing landscapes in various media. In January 1750 Cozens was appointed drawing-master to Christ’s Hospital (a London charity school that educated orphans for apprenticeship). He taught there for four years, using as models his own drawings and the New and Compleat Drawing Book (1750), attributed to Edward Lens and Bernard Lens, and incorporating engravings made after drawings by Bernard Lens.

 

The Top of a Hill with a Cross, a Hill Beyond  

Trees and Rocks above a Pool  

Rocks and Trees, a Coast Line Beyond