John Sell Cotman (Norwich 1782 - London 1842)

In an arrestingly harmonious composition, the viewer’s eye is drawn at first to the marker in the bottom left hand corner before a bobbing barrel brings the eye in line with a group of brightly dressed men rowing their fishing boat strongly away from the larger ship behind. In the distance, veiled in a light mist, a ship can be seen on the horizon and in the far left hand corner of the painting, two further ships billow in a stiff breeze. The reeds and grasses of the river bank rustle and bend in the wind and their green is highlighted with silver and white strokes to emphasise the wind sweeping across them.

The River Yare is situated in the English county of Norfolk. In its lower reaches, the river connects with the navigable waterways of the Norfolk Broads. It rises close to the village of Shipdham near Dereham and then winds eastwards towards Norwich. At Barford, it is joined by the smaller river Tiffey. On the outskirts of Norwich it passes through Earlham Park and loops around the University of East Anglia before finally discharging into the North Sea at Gorleston, Great Yarmouth.

John Sell Cotman, an English landscape and watercolour painter, together with John Crome (1768-1821), was one of the most important representatives of the Norwich School of artists. The significance of Norwich School painting lies in its realism based on direct observation. The movement marks a departure from the rococo prettiness of Gainsborough and the Arcadian classical landscape favoured by Claude and Poussin.

In 1798, Cotman was first employed by Rudolf Ackerman, proprietor of the Depository of Arts in the Strand. Two years later he became a member of the circle of artists around the collector Sir George Beaumont through whom he met Thomas Girtin (1775-1802). By 1806, Cotman had settled in Norwich where he opened a school of drawing and design. He became vice-president of the Norwich Society of Artists which Crome had founded. In 1834, he was appointed to a professorship of drawing at King’s College, London.

In his earlier watercolour landscapes Cotman already displayed a strong sense of classical design. He used large flat washes to build up form in clearly defined planes and austerely decorative patterns. From c.1810 he devoted himself also to etching as a mode of expression for his love of architectural antiquities, which formed a bond with his patron Dawson Turner.

Between 1816 and 1818 he brought out two books on the architectural antiquities of Norfolk, followed by the Sepulchral Brasses in Norfolk and Suffolk in 1819. He spent the summers of 1817, 1818, and 1820 making sketches in Normandy, from which he made plates for Dawson Turner’s Architectural Antiquities of Normandy (1822) and Tour in Normandy (1820).