Arts
Bicentenary
John McEwen
David Cox 1783-1859 (Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery till 14 October;
Street, WI, till 12 August) avid Cox passed the prime of his career
h is London (a plaque commemorates [us living at 34 Foxley Road, Kennington) and Hereford, but he was born and bred in Birmingham and returned there for the last ,n Years of his life. With Burne-Jones he liaS SO far proved the most lastingly famous of Birmingham artists, so 'it is only right that this exhibition commemorating the 200th anniversary of his birth has been in- stigated by, and first shown in, the city.
r, my edition of the Murrays dictionary 'Ox rates a shorter entry than J. R. Cozens, a much longer one than Francis Towne (unmentioned) and about the same as Cot- :11; an. In Britain Observed (another dic- tionary of sorts) Grigson is more down on nun than this. He quotes George Moore writing of an artist whose eyes were strange- ly his own 'in a time of slushy David Cox- e s'' and agrees that the word 'slushy' is too often aPpropriate. Apart from mixing his paints so that his pictures were 'slushy' to 1.?.°1( at, he also reckons that Cox kept one ;Ye on his market and delivered according- 'Y. A Victorian potboiler for most of his career, the only works Grigson awards any 13°, ints are some of the early aquatints and Oils. The Murrays hint at the same — Cox's effects may be broad but the vigour of his handling sometimes appears forced, 'as if for exhibition' — and the three catalogue essays (by separate authors) disdain Judgments and generalities altogether, con- c,sentrating instead on the smaller change of footnote specialisation: Cox as a faithful propaganda; of Burkean, and therefore Tory, i'oPaganda; as a drawing master; as a guest at Haddon Hall. The notes to the pictures are jollier, but why Cox is in the rare ict corn- .any of those who survive oblivion — his pures admired today as much as and pro- QablY much more than they were all those
Years ago is not discussed.
The first thing to be said is that slush and pitbraii; —ng are nowhere to be seen. Had th eY ever been, of course, Cox would surely with passed into eternal darkness along his painter son, his pupils and the 99 hascent of his painter contemporaries. He __. on the contrary, unusual technical mand, allowing him daring short cuts !Odd the joys of experimentation, and a vel and often amused eye; and he has
made one subject in particular memorably his own — the lonely traveller on the blasted heath. Constable may be our greatest painter of windy weather in general, but Cox is the master of wind in open country. It can be on the coast, like the wonderful storm scene 'Laugharne Cas- tle, Carmarthenshire', but is most famously on the plain, as in 'Sun, Wind and Rain'. His grand designs are too closely observed for grandiloquence, enlivened with incident but never fussily. A train passes in the distance of 'Sun, Wind and Rain', its straight path in progressive contrast to the meandering road of the travellers. As a metaphor of life's journey the traveller and the lonely road is a Dutch invention in pic- tures, but no artist uses it more poetically than Cox, perhaps because he does it so unobtrusively. His travellers are often ask- ing the way. They are a witness to the un- signed, unpeopled wilderness of England before the towns and railways came; but the context is never quite the same, never pot- boiled in the slightest.
The general diversity of style and content in Cox's work is in fact the revelation of both these exhibitions, of Anthony Reed's exquisite miniature survey as much as the grander commemoration. In materials he is revealed to be as good a painter with oil as, more famously till now, with water. In style his early oils are worthy of Corot for brevi- ty of handling and clarity of light, the later more heavily coated and dramatically organised. His watercolours evolve through limpidity and the most precise detail to the broken paint and pencilwork of his last and most energetic views, encouraged by a lik- ing for rough wrapping-paper as a surface. In subject he encompassed marine and landscape in most of its aspects, many views of towns (including factory town and foreign ones) and buildings (external and internal), still-lives, animal studies, even a possible self-portrait. The accusation that he painted what the public wanted, usher- ing in the sloppy sentimentalism of the Vic- torian genre scene, is always repudiated by the evidence of the work. He is too much of an 18th-century man for slop. At Anthony Reed there is a charming picture of three boys in a meadow keeping a bull at bay by hurling stones. No doubt they stoned the bull in the first place.
Cox lived for his work and had an utterly unsensational life, but the few glimpses of him are endearing. The way he rose to the bait of Turner always calling him 'Daniel'; his jovial answer to a small boy who had watched him sketching and asked if he could have a finished drawing: 'Oh! My lad, do you know it is worth five pounds?'
Despite his few travels to France and the Low Countries he was, as his descendant Sir Trenchard Cox has written, 'incredibly insular'. A gentleman once tried to per- suade the junior Cox to paint in Switzerland: `Don't try to induce David to go on the Continent in search of scenery,' he was rebuked by the senior. 'Wales, Yorkshire and Derbyshire have been good enough for me, and I quite believe they may yet do for him'. 'The values advanced by his paintings are Tory values' we are told at the outset, but the notes include an eye- witness description, which reports Cox as saying that 'many a time, when he has knocked at a pupil's door, to give a lesson, he has not had the faintest conception of what he should do as an example, but that, when he had taken his seat to begin, col- ours, paper, and pencils before him, an idea had suddenly flashed across his mind, of some effect previously seen, which, coupled with a well-remembered subject, he dashed upon the paper, the result surprising even himself'. It is for this, surely, rather than his 'Tory values', that he continues to be admired.
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