Footnotes

Provenance
With Walkers Galleries, London, from whom acquired in 1932 by
Frederick J Nettlefold, and by descent through the family

Literature
C.R. Grundy, Catalogue of the pictures and drawings in the collection of Frederick J. Nettlefold, 1933, vol. I
C.F. Bell and T. Girtin, 'The drawings and sketches of John Robert Cozens', The twenty-third volume of the Walpole Society, 1934-1935, p. 45, no. 144, iv
F. Hawcroft, Watercolours by John Robert Cozens, London, 1971, exh. cat., p. 19, under no. 26
A. Wilton, The art of Alexander and John Robert Cozens, New Haven, 1980, exh. cat., p. 42, under no. 94



John Robert Cozens made his first trip to Italy in 1776-1779 in the company of Richard Payne Knight, (1751-1824), the renowned critic, classical scholar, antiquarian and collector. He was to return in the early 1780s as draughtsman to William Beckford, but on the first trip when the present work was painted, he and Payne Knight travelled through Switzerland before descending through the mountains of Savoy into Italy gathering many sketches of the craggy alpine scenery through which they travelled. Cozens was trained by his father, the artist and drawing master Alexander Cozens (1717-1786) who was one of the earliest British artists to have studied in Italy and whose notion that an artist could engender a variety of emotional reactions in the viewer with different types of landscape (later published in his treatise 'Various Species of Landscape etc. in Nature') undoubtedly shaped his son's outlook.

Payne Knight left Rome on an expedition to Sicily in April and May of 1777 in the company of a fellow amateur draughtsman Charles Gore and the German painter Jacob Philipp Hackert, but it is thought that Cozens did not accompany them. The probable reason for this was one of cost - as Payne Knight was already travelling with a professional artist and a talented amateur he may have felt that he would be able to obtain reliable topographical drawings from them without going to the additional expense of paying for Cozens to come too. Around this time we begin to see large, dated drawings by Cozens of Rome, Tivoli, Albano and Nemi suggesting that he was exploring the environs of Rome in their absence; it is thought that the present composition is part of the group conceived at that time.

If travelling artists were attracted by scenery that was most strikingly in contrast to the familiar landscapes of Britain, Cozens accentuated the curious topography of the volcanic landscape of Nemi with the unusual viewpoint he chose for this composition. The lake was known as the Speculum Dianae, the Mirror of Diana, because of its perfectly circular form and it was the focal point of the cult of Diana to whom a temple had been dedicated in ancient times near the shore below the town. Cozens's vantage point is set well below the horizon line and beneath the town of Nemi which is perched on the curving outcrop of rock in the middle distance. The viewer is given no suggestion of what he is standing on and as we look down into the sweeping caldera the ground drops away so sharply that it gives us the dizzying sense we are falling into the landscape before us. This is nature seen in all its awe-inspiring grandeur, an embodiment of Edmund Burke's theory of the 'terrifying sublime' where an artistic effect is designed to produce the strongest possible emotional reaction in the viewer. With his typical palette of blues and greys, Cozens conveys the contrasting textures of the landscape - the thick vegetation of the slopes, the light filtering through the transparent leaves of the trees in the foreground, the glassy surface of the water and the softer, nebulous treatment of the clouds in the distance. Paul Oppé commented that Cozens's ability 'lies in the vision by which contrasting light and darkness, upward lines with downward, curves and angles....seizes and communicates the thrill or shock of sudden confrontation with the superhuman, or to use the old word the Sublime'.

Of the five recorded versions of this composition the present one is much the largest, the other four all being on sheets that are half the size of this one at around 38 x 51 cms (15 x 20 ins) such as the watercolours in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art and Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery. This very large format was not unprecedented, however, Cozens painted other subjects on this scale and is likely to have taken his lead from his fellow topographical watercolourists working in Rome at the time such as Hackert, Ducros and Lusieri who were producing very large watercolours. They were most likely intending to challenge the popular notion that oil paintings were in some way superior to watercolours, and demonstrated that landscapes painted on paper could be every bit as eloquent, technically impressive and valid as their counterparts on canvas. The series of watercolours of the environs of Rome painted by the Swiss artist Abraham Louis Ducros for Sir Richard Colt Hoare and now hanging at Stourhead in Wiltshire, each measuring around 78 x 118cms or 30 x 46 ins, amply demonstrate this.

It was familiarity with Cozens's larger watercolours that undoubtedly encouraged Turner and Sandby to paint on a similar scale; his influence on Turner, in particular, is well known. Suffering from mental illness in his later years, Cozens came under the care of Dr Monro (1759-1833), an amateur artist and collector who was a physician at Bethlem Hospital. He added works by his patient Cozens to his existing collection of watercolours by Thomas Gainsborough, Thomas Hearne and others. Munro's home at Adelphi Terrace doubled in the winter months as an 'academy' where young watercolourists were given encouragement and, in exchange for dinner and a small consideration, were tasked with making copies of works from his collection. Among those who frequented the academy on a weekly basis were Girtin and Turner who copied many of Cozens's works, so studying his sketches of Italy became a formative part of their early training. Today Cozens is perhaps more of a cult figure than a household name, but this belies the enormous influence he had on the development of watercolour painting in Britain in the early 19th century. As Kim Sloan wrote 'John Robert Cozens had finally lifted watercolour painting out of the topographical recording of nature, to a new level where it was as capable of fulfilling the serious intentions of art as oil painting' (K. Sloan, Alexander and John Robert Cozens: The Poetry of Landscape, Yale, 1986).

The provenance of the present watercolour is remarkable, since it has remained in the same private collection for nearly a century and although it is mentioned in the literature on the artist it has not been seen on public view for over 90 years. Frederick John Nettlefold (1867-1949) who acquired it in 1932 was a theatrical actor and manager, patron of the arts and football enthusiast. He was a collector of paintings and watercolours as well as owning a prodigious collection of Martinware ceramics and he donated works to a number of museums in the UK including the British Museum and Kelvingrove Art Gallery, Glasgow. A catalogue of his collection – which included a large number of watercolours - was printed in three volumes in 1933, but fortunately his records of acquisitions also still survive [fig. 1] showing that he bought the Cozens from Walker's Galleries in London in December 1932 together with a group of other watercolours. It is interesting to see that while those were priced at four or five guineas each, the Cozens cost him £262 10s, a substantial sum at the time. The Nettlefold fortune had been made from steel and hardware, and Frederick's father added to this an interest in the silk manufacturing business through family links to the Courtaulds; Frederick John also sat on the Courtauld board. The original Nettlefold company was founded in the early years of the Industrial Revolution and continues today as GKN (Guest, Keen and Nettlefold).