David Cox was one of the greatest British landscape painters of the first half of the 19th century and his mastering of the medium of watercolour, sets him, along with his contemporary Peter De Wint (1784-1849), apart from many of his contemporaries. From his earliest works, his watercolours show a preoccupation with atmosphere, the effects of light and the weather.
Cox was born in Birmingham and first studied drawing at a school run by Joseph Barber (1757-1811), before being apprenticed to a toy maker in 1798 where he was paid to decorate the lids of snuff boxes and lockets with miniatures. By 1800 he was working at the Birmingham Theatre, initially mixing colours for the scene painters and then painting the scenery himself. In 1804 he moved to London where he continued to work in the various theatres until 1808 when, following his marriage, he decided to focus on watercolour painting and teaching, which became his key source of income. Two years later he was made President of the Associated Artists in Watercolour, and exhibited there from 1809 to 1812, when he moved to the Old Water Colour Society, of which he was elected an Associate and where he continued to exhibit for the rest of his life.
In 1814 he became drawing master at the Military Academy at Farnham, followed by other teaching posts at schools. During the holidays he would make regular sketching tours, particularly to North Wales. He also travelled abroad to Holland and Belgium in 1826, then Paris via Calais in 1829 and Dieppe and Boulogne in 1832. On his return from his first foreign trip, he moved to London and his teaching practice flourished. He also travelled extensively around Britain.
In 1841 he returned to Birmingham, taking a lease on Greenfield House in Harborne, and began to focus more on his oil paintings and passed much of his teaching practice onto his son. He visited North Wales and particularly Bettws-y-Coed almost annually between 1844 and 1856. Cox published a number of drawing manuals including A Treatise on Landscape Painting and Effect in Watercolour, 1814, A Series of Progressive Lessons in Watercolour, 1816 and The Young Artist’s Companion, 1825.
Pivotal to understanding Cox’s paintings, particularly his later works, is an appreciation of the success of his teaching practice: from as early as 1827 he was able to charge one guinea a lesson and this financial success allowed him to be freed from the travails and demands of commercial success and vagaries of fashion that many of his fellow artists were subjected to and he became increasingly experimental with great freedom of expression as seen in his late works. The relationship between his increasingly free technique and natural phenomena became very close.
Characteristic of Cox is his dynamic under-drawing, seen in several sketches and watercolours in this collection. These expressive lines effectively capture a fleeting moment, yet are suggestive of movement.
Certainly, an engagement with nature through sketching outdoors was central to the progression of Cox’s art. Solly in his Memoir of the Life of David Cox, London, 1873, p. 310 writes, ‘In truth to nature, the works of Cox should be ranked especially high…conveyed as if by inspiration, in a rapid, almost loose manner, yet thorough and comprehensive, full of pathos, feeling, and sympathy with nature in all her moods and aspects. … Thus Cox has rendered with equal truth pictures of the bustle and throng of market-places of wide reaches of sandy shores melting away in the silvery light of early morning, or seas and skies bathed in the soft yellow glow of sunset, peaceful brooks fringed with broad-leaved water-plants, harvest fields full of breezy daylight and the cheerful movement of pastoral life, and harmless rural frolic; or, on the other hand, angry torrents pent between crags and the debris of rocks, dark mountains wreathed with mists, and the dreary moorland swept by pitiless storms…. Cox’s work carries you in spirit into the very scene itself…. You feel the summer’s breeze on your cheek, smell the perfume of the new-made hay, see the birds soaring in the sky, the clouds driven by the wind and hear the roaring of the wintry blast, and the wild roar of many waters’.
His adeptness at expressing the elements encouraged the epigram that Cox anticipated the Impressionists and Solly notes that, ‘He had the habit, sometimes, when impressed with a rapid passage of light, movement of clouds, or other effect, of turning with his back to the scene, and making a rapid memorandum… of the effect as it existed in his mind, as he said that the impression was more fresh, powerful, and vivid thus than if he had continued to gaze on the scene’. Solly, op.cit., p. 313.
Landscape art’s success relies on its capturing the poetry of nature; Cox’s success at this gave rise to Solly likening him to ‘Wordsworth and to Burns, in the intense love for Nature, truthfulness, and pathos, which are the chief and noblest characteristics of his works,’op.cit., p. 316.
This watercolour showing figures strolling alongside the beach at Aberystwyth echoes some of Cox’s most successful and charming works which depict figures crossing the sands. These works have a lightness of touch and economy of line which perfectly captures the fresh conditions of a seaside promenade. There is another drawing by Cox of the promenade at Aberystwyth, taken from a point nearer the headland, is in the National Library of Wales. It is possible that these drawings were executed on the same day and within a few hours of each other as the sun and tide are in roughly the same position.