DAVID COX—ARTIST

Greymouth Evening Star, 19 December 1934, Page 10

DAVID COX—ARTIST

A SON OF THE SMITHY. r I I I was writing here not long since ’ about the sons of farmers and their ; rise ro fame, and now comes a correspondent to urge the claims of butch- ’ ers as sires of eminence and to provide a list of chips of those blocks, , (writes E. V. Lucas in the London j “Sunday Times”). Alphabetically, his choice of butchers’ sons makes a ’ strangely assorted company, beginning with Mark Akenside, the poet and doctor (whose name has led to so ‘ much schoolboy humour), and con--5 tinning with John Jacob Astor, the American millionaire; Daniel Defoe: ' Thomas Harrison, the regicide and colleague of Cromwell, whose good hum- ' our on his own scaffold a few years ■ after the execution of Charles I is • described by Pcpys; John Harvard, the English founder of the American college which bears his name, whose father was a butcher of Southwark; John Huxliam, a physician of investi- , gating genius in the eighteenth century; Arthur Orton, the claimant to , the Tichbornc estates; Henry Kirke ; White, the poet whose works used to bo as inevitable in the second-hand book shops of half a century ago as > Falconer's “Shipwreck,” and, finally, Cardinal Wolsey. The list is supplemented by the surprising addition of ' a butcher’s daughter: no less a personage than Madame de Pompadour. Whether an analysis of the parentage of all our gifted countrymen would indicate anything of value. 1 am doubtful; but it would be an ampsiug task to undertake. Blacksmiths, for instance—what, kind of contribution have they made to the ranks of eminence, what kind of light have the sparks from their anvils spread? We have'it on the authority of Longfellow' that one blacksmith, at tiny rate, was the progenitor of a female vocalist. As I write, I can think of only one blacksmith’s son of genius, and that was a member of the Cox family of whom I was saying something a month ago—David Cox, the landscape painter, whose lather's forge was at Deritend. on the outskirts of Birmingham, and who himself for a while helped in the ' work there—as every boy must have 1 longed to do. 1 wish I could say : “must long to do”; but since motor- * cars came in and horses went out, ( the smithy has become such a rarity ' that millions of children have never ‘ seen one at all. But how exciting they were to watch! The glowing iron c yielding under the blows. The paring a of the hoof: the first surgical opera- 1 tion most of us had ever witnessed. “ The sizzle of smoke as the* shoe was applied to it. The roaring response D of the fire to the bellows. c

FIRST WATER COLOURS. When one is born to a smithy possibly the life of a smith is not so alibiing. Anyway, the young David Cox did not persevere with it, partly because he was not physically strong, and partly because when, as a child he had broken his leg and was con' fined to bed, an imaginative friend had given him a box of water-colours. To all of us in our early years boxes of water-colours are given; but most of us get no more from them than a craving for the taste of madder brown or crimson lake. David Cox. on the contrary, quickly learned to use them with skill and to love to use them, and thenceforward every step he took

was in the direction of the studio. For a while he painted kites for his schoolfellows; then he coloured prints or made coloured copies of them; and at last he was entered in the drawing school of Joseph Barber, to qualify him to be apprenticed, at the age of 15, to a painter of miniatures and leckcls named Fielder, with whom no doubt he would have remained for the ■ full period had not Fielder, suddenly finding life no longer bearable, hanged himself. Thus unexpectedly relieved of his indentures, the youth was 'free to be engaged by the scene-painter iof the Birmingham Theatre, of which | Macready’s father was lessee, and ho 'lost no time in proving that this was ,the opening he had been waiting for. I For three or four years he remained ' with Macready, either at Birmingham cr on tour, occasionally varying i his labours as a scene-painter by taking a small part, and once, at any rate, leaping on the stage g,s a clown, and then at the age of 20, he broke away and made for London. When, a little while ago, I was writing here about the evolution of the English circus and outlining the career cf Philip Astley, I made (a column being only a column ) no reference to the fact that when, after one of his disastrous fires, he built a new and more splendid successor at Lambeth, which was opened in 1804,. some of his scenes were painted by David Cox. But so it was. The lives of the scenepainters have, so far as I know, never been written—at any rate, in one book, and they should be. High on the list would be our friend, for whom Loudon not. only fulfilled her old function of providing young genius with opportunity, but. went, on to her other duty of providing it. with a wife, once

ngaiii arranging- Unit Unit, wife should lie a landlady's daughter. Although Mary Raff was .12 years older than her husband their partnership was ideal.

There would be no need to follow the career of David Cox in detail, even if there were space, for it was all of a piece. After taking some lessons frem John Varley, who. the fine old fellow, would accept no fees for them, he began to sketch in the open air and continued to do so until he was well over 50, selling the results to dealers at very low prices, and giving tuition where he could. Money, except as a vehicle to provide the necessaries of life, had no interest for him; all he wanted was the green earth under moving clouds, and a brush to dip into colour. The glories of the visible world never ceased to enchant him, and in the endeavour to capture them and fix them on paper he was content. When the dark day came and he could do nothing out of doors, this most modest of masters would sit down to copy from memory pictures by other artists whom he admired: Turner chief of them, but also Cotman and Bonington. What he thought of Constable I cannot say, but it is to Constable that both in ambition and performance he is most closely allied.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about David Cox's career is the way in which it falls into two parts. From his association with Varley in. say, 1805 until 1839, he painted only in water-colours. From 1839, when he was 56, until the end, 20 later, he painted in oils and made of that medium a complete servant. Here again wc have an example of his humility and directness, for his chief inspiration towards the change was the young William James Muller, whom, fascinated, he watched at work. Not often in the history of art can a master of 56 have placed himself at the feet of a rival of 27.