Tag: John Sell Cotman
Three solitary figures in a landscape
1 Man on a mountain Caspar David Friedrich painted the work usually called The wanderer above the sea of fog in 1818. Though it found little fame at the time, it’s long been seen as the quintessence of German Romanticism in the visual arts. Friedrich was the mountain man of the early nineteenth century. Until […]
Welsh paintings: gwallter’s top 10
Paintings, not painters, you’ll notice. And the artists are all safely dead (this avoids treading on the toes of the living). Third, I wouldn’t claim that these are the best ten paintings. They’re just works that have given me special pleasure and contemplation. Many aren’t very well known. But see what you think about my […]
Cornelius Varley in Wales
Among the many artists who came to draw and paint in Wales around the turn of the eighteenth century, Cornelius Varley is yet to receive just attention. The pictures he made in Wales are fresh, delicate and strong, the work of a young man with great visual intelligence who reacted with instinctive wonder and clarity […]
John Sell Cotman in Wales
There are a few great British artists we remember not for their continuous work over a lifetime, but for a short period of brilliant achievement in an otherwise (apparently) ordinary career. Two well-known examples are Samuel Palmer, in the case of the ‘visionary’ works painted during the early years of his stay in Shoreham, […]
Whistler’s long voyage: Rotherhithe to Battersea
‘Whistler and the Thames’, which comes to an end at the Dulwich Picture Gallery on 12 January, is the best sort of exhibition: one that places right in front of your retina an artist previously spotted only with peripheral vision. James McNeill Whistler was born in Lowell, Mass. in 1834, moved with his family to […]