Francis Place at Coxwold
I’ve written before about Francis Place, late seventeenth century artist and potter, and about Coxwold in north Yorkshire. This piece brings the two together.
Place was a landscapist ahead of his time, in vision (he anticipated the watercolour painters of the second half of the eighteenth century) and also in method (he walked for long distances to make his sketches on the spot). In 1678 he made a tour of south Wales on foot, and has a claim to be one of the earliest landscape artists to work there. Coxwold is the setting of Laurence Sterne’s home, Shandy Hall, and St Michael’s, the remarkable church of which he was vicar. The broad, grass-lined main street reflects Coxwold’s status as the ‘estate village’ of Lord Fauconberg, who lived in nearby Newburgh Priory.
Place lived in York, where he was a member of the ‘York Virtuosi’, a group of scientists, artists and historians that prefigured the Yorkshire Philosophical Society. Coxwold was therefore in easy reach, and Place seems to have found the village a congenial place in which to work. In the York Art Gallery is a black chalk and wash drawing labelled ‘Coxwold’. In fact it’s a landscape not of Coxwold, but sketched from Coxwold – possibly from the high part of the road leading from Coxwold to Kilburn. It has trees in the foreground and the escarpment of Sutton Bank behind (one section is labelled ‘cliff’). The scarp slope is rather less wooded than it is today and has fields in most of its upper parts (beyond lie the North York Moors). It’s also lacking, of course, the White Horse above Kilburn, only cut into the sandstone and ‘chalked’ by Thomas Taylor in 1857.
Place made his informal sketch in 1717. It’s full of life and enjoyment in the landscape. The trees form dark rounded clumps, ‘fuzzy’ in parts, and their trunks seem to dance in jaunty sets of parallel vertical strokes. Beyond them, washes indicate distance, and also, possibly, mist collected in the valley. In contrast to all this impressionism, Place records the slopes and horizons of Sutton Bank in meticulous detail. In short, his sketch is nothing like the flat topographical landscape drawings of his contemporaries. Rather, it has much more in common with the work of much later watercolourists.
Today, people make sketches and take photos in the opposite direction – from the top of Sutton Bank looking out westwards over the Vale of Mowbray, views of thirty miles and more. Some people, or at least some Yorkshire people, claim the view to be the best in England. Francis Place, though, could see the artistic possibilities of the view to the east.
Place travelled north from York to draw on many occasions – there are depictions of Scarborough, Pickering and other places. In 1711 he visited Knaresborough and sketched the famous petrifying ‘dropping well’ there. He’s close up to his subject in this drawing, but it has the same qualities as the Coxwold sketch: careful detail, in the treatment of the complex rock formations, and a sensitive impressionism, for the trees in the distance.
There’s another, more tenuous connection between Francis Place and Coxwold. After years as a visual artist, Place turned to making pottery. He produced vessels that could easily pass for pottery made centuries later, in the late twentieth century. In 1965 Peter and Jill Dick set up a studio in the village. Peter had been a student of Michael Cardew, and the husband-and-wife team made many kinds of wheel-thrown slipware, using a wood-fired kiln, for what they called the ‘Coxwold Pottery’. Jill later specialised in producing raku ware. Their pots were widely admired and exhibited. Francis Place could easily have recognised them as belonging to his own tradition. Some of Peter’s work can be seen in St Michael’s Church. He died in 2012, and the Coxwold Pottery died with him.