ENGLISH VERSION Alexander Cozens, A New Method of Assisting the Invention in Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape (1785) con una recensione del 1981 di Mario Praz

Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro
CLICK HERE FOR ITALIAN EDITION

Alexander Cozens A New Method of Assisting the Invention
in Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape
(1785)

Edited by Paola Lavezzari

Canova editore, 1981

Alexander Cozens, Landscape with Mountain and Lake (1750)

[1] Limited edition of 700 copies.

[2] The book is divided in two parts. The first part has a usual layout in typographic terms. As regards the second, "the text of the original edition is an offset reprint" (p. VI).

[3] This book was extensively reviewed by Mario Praz in a literary article appeared in the Rome daily Il Tempo on 17 May 1981. The text of the review is copied below. The original article is attached to the book.

When blots inspired painters

by Mario Praz

Throughout the XXth century, the dominant trend in art has been abstraction, as we wanted to follow the opposite process to that of the natural man, validated by a tradition that goes from Philostratus, Pliny, Leon Battista Alberti, Leonardo, Vasari, the Chinese painting of the eleventh century, the Dutch one in the seventeenth, and finally the «sceglitori di macchie» (blot searchers) at the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence. Instead of interpreting blots as for instance hinting to the heads of men, to diverse animals, battles, and rocks and so on, or identifying anthropomorphic patterns in the outlines of mountains and continents, it has been taken for granted – on the contrary - to see only blots and patterns voided of any objective content, in the heads of men, in various animals, in landscapes. The heads have become eggs in De Chirico’s metaphysical paintings, as they had already become eggs in wig-holding dummies, and as they are now in clothing stores and in dress museums. You may be surprised that the taste had remaine focused for centuries on the Greek -Roman sculpture, and that the Apollo Belvedere and the Medici Venus had gained so much admiration as it is acknowledged in the volume Taste and the Antique by Francis Haskell e Nicholas Penny (Yale University Press 1980). But, what will future centuries say of our sculpture museums, where mere aggregates of inorganic forms and even wires, lights and furniture are considered as pieces of memorable artwork? And what will they say of our painting museums, where compositions void of any objective content, suggesting at most chaos, are given the name of landscapes? 

A Cartographer 

In the bizarre cartography by Opicinus de Canistris, an Italian cleric employed at the papal court in Avignon, the coastlines of the Mediterranean basin were transformed into an erotic encounter between a mulier (female) whose head and nose were formed from Morocco, with the promontory of Tangier as a nose pointing to the ear of the vir (male), whose head was formed by Spain and whose arms were the Italian and Greek peninsulas. The woman (Africa) says: "Venite, comunicamini nobiscum” [Come, and communicate with us]. An inscription says “vir animus bestialis, femina caro corrupta” [the male has a bestial soul, the female corrupted flesh]. Jurgis Baltrusaitis does not mention this anthropomorphic mapping in the volume Aberrations, Légendes des formes [Aberrations, Legends of forms] (Paris, Perrin, 1957), where he explores in four monographs some bizarre streams of taste: the animal physiognomy, the figured stones, the tale of Gothic architecture, the illusionary gardens and villages. 

These are topics that would have greatly charmed our Lorenzo Magalotti, who even tried to set up certain metaphysical cogitations on similar themes, which make us smile today. Regrettably, we do not have but a few hints from him about the appreciation that must have existed for those representations of animate beings and places that, in his day, the  Opificio delle Pietre Dure had possible thanks to creative soul of its "spot searchers”. In one of his Lettere familiari contro l’ateismo [Letter to his relatives against atheism] he says that had sold a lot of stones, and especially a lot of oriental agate, shaped in figures of flowers, trees, faces and human limbs, "remarkable for delicacy of design". Those suggestions that Leonardo saw in old walls’ blots, ‘searchers’ found in the semi-precious marbles that went under the name of semi-precious stones. The masks of reality are imposed to a coincidence and replace it. One saw in minerals, especially in agate, the burning of Troy, the passage of the Red Sea, and even crucified Christ full of nails, wounds and blood drops. Pagans (as already Pliny talked about this) saw gods and demigods, Sileni and Pans, in similar figures; Christians saw saints, monks and hermits, Italians scenes of the ancient era, Nordics episodes from the Bible. We attributed these wonders to the East, in the North they did it to Italy and called them ‘Florentine stones‘. 

In the eighteenth century an English painter, Alexander Cozens (who claimed he had seen only later Leonardo’s passage) even based on the deliberate production of blots a new method to enhance creativity; the curious treatise bears no date, but is of 1785. A new Method of Assisting the Invention, in Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape, has been reprinted with the figures from A.P. Oppé at the end of his erudite and comprehensive monograph on Alexander and John Robert Cozens (London, Black, 1952), and now in Italy in the series "Fonti per la Storia dell’Arte” [Sources for the History of Art], directed by Luigi Grassi, published by the Institute of history of the Faculty of Education at the University of Rome, with introduction, translation and commentary by Paola Lavezzari (Libreria Editrice Canova, 1981 edition limited to 700 copies). The two Cozens, which are among the largest British water-colourists, derived inspiration from the study and technical development of our landscapes and our skies. It was the golden age of the Castelli Romani, when (in 1773), the fourth Count of Bristol, Bishop of Derry, proclaimed to the world that there was no more "romantic" sight than the one he enjoyed from his house in Albano; while Rome and its countryside formed the dominant theme of the work of Alexander Cozens (1717-1786) and his son John Robert (1752-1797). This is however not the reason why they are famous (so many painters were inspired by the Italian landscape!), but rather for their effects on skies and clouds and their technique. Especially Alexander Cozens sketched landscapes in black and white, with a synthetic and magic vision that has some affinity with the sketches of Claude Lorraine, but find a more apt parallel with monochromatic landscapes in China. He was defined “blotmaster general to the town” for the spread of his easy method that was addressed especially to gentlemen amateurs of painting.

Alexander Cozens advised this method to young painters to stimulate their invention, even when they already possessed that rare quality he called genius: “Prepare paper and material. 1) Set yourself a theme in mind. 2) Take a camel-hair paint brush, great as it can be used conveniently, dip it in a mixture of water and ink drawing, which will have the degree of density that will best benefit your intent, and with the greatest rapidity make every possible variety of blots and marks on your paper, placing the whole in accordance with the theme you had in mind. 3) Do not just do one or two spots, but make a number of them on different sheets, so you have a choice when you want to make use of one of them for the composition of the landscape." Cozens believed that preconceived ideas assist imagination in producing blots and that, moreover, the exercise of producing them strengthens and improves the ideas, that would otherwise languish if they were not implemented. That aggregate of accidental forms which is a blot “gives an idea of light and shadow masses, as well as the objects that will form the final composition." The semblance is that of a finished drawing placed at a certain distance from the eye, or (putting the blot at some distance) it will have the appearance of a finished drawing executed with exceptional liveliness. When the time comes to turn the blot into a sketch, it will be possible to leave out every sign that does not seem "natural", but it will be forbidden to add anything that is not suggested by the blot itself. Using this method will prevent the mind to be distracted by trivial details, as it happens when copying directly from the truth. That general ideas should receive particular emphasis (and not peculiarities like in portraits) was a concept that had broad consensus in the eighteenth century, and which was taken into account by painters such as Gainsborough, of which one critic of the time wrote, about his landscape production: "in his later works his intent seemed to have been to obtain general effects, fleeting hints of forms to which the eye of the viewer must give a name; cutting short, to put it in two words, to make elegant spots." 

Lavezzari does not agree with considering the Cozens as followers of the ‘blot tradition’ that goes back to Leonardo and beyond. By adhering to this theory– the authoress says – critics before Oppé "deprived of any theory basis the attempt to justify or to prove as not simply groundless and arbitrary, the proposal of this [blot] method in that particular cultural situation, and to explain its relevance in relation in that situation." 

Optimism 

In her long introduction, Lavezzari has proposed a redundant framing of Cozens’method in eighteenth-century culture. She cites a number of texts in the original, especially the essay on genius of Gerard, and passages by T. Reid, A. Alison W. Gilpin, R. Payne Knight, Reynolds, and others, all aiming at illustrating an optimistic conception of Nature that "makes its best to render the Earth cheerful and delightful", "a universe as a theatre full of objects that arouse in us pleasure, enjoyment and admiration" among which "the philosopher can seize the character of a perfect serenity as a model of perfect virtue". A concept of which Aldous Huxley in the XX century will show the fallacy in his essay on "Wordsworth in the Tropic", while a more exact knowledge of birdsong will show that - instead of expressing their joy in the Creation - it is a form of defensive warning against the threat to their nests. Lavezzari lingers as well on browsing texts on the nature of genius, on the function of memory in the invention according to Locke (a theme that I tried to update in my Mnemosyne), on gardening (in as much as it provides to the rural scene what a noble and full of grace behaviour gives to the silhouette of man), and on the concept of grace and of pleasant negligence, which Addison pointed out as extremely fashionable. The grace of the landscape is encoded by Cozens exactly like the gesture of grace, in the well-known criteria of the wavy line by Hogarth. For Gilpin, ploughing works are a show of delight: one looks at the farmers’ efforts with good will and pleasure, thinking about their lives of peace, ease and innocence (George Crabbe will present the life of the peasants as very different from this pastoral idealization). In short: "Cozens certainly reflects the reasons that date back to a long tradition, but viewed through the specific angle according to which those reasons had been re-proposed by the cultural circles of his time, therefore mediated not only by arguments of Reynolds, but more specifically Gerard, whose Essay on the Genius preceded of a decade the New Method."

An observation of the Discourse XIV by Reynolds (1788) deserves to be recalled, for it could provide an opportunity for a longer debate on painting: "Worthy of imitation is another technique by Gainsborough, that is his way of forming all together the parts of a picture: the entire set proceeded at once, just as Nature creates his works. That this is not the universal use is proved by the practice by Pompeo Batoni, who finished off his history paintings one part after the other, and in his portraits ended up completely a particular before switching to another, with the result that the appearance was never well expressed, and the picture never well combined together." Reynolds, and the Cozens themselves, emphasise that recalling in an analytical way the particular aspects of objects is not a natural mind process. It was a principle , which has now been taken to the extreme consequences of setting it to zero.