From 1803 to 1805 the English watercolorist John Sell Cotman spent much time in the north of England and Wales under the patronage of a highly agreeable family of landed gentry, the Cholmeleys. In his early twenties at the time, the son of a wigmaker from Norwich, Cotman was eager to continue his sketching tours in the scenic north and Wales, tours that were considered de rigueur for young landscape painters of the day. Previously thought of as a medium for intimate, small-scale, personal, and spontaneous work, watercolor was emerging as a genre worthy of serious attention and respect. Cotman’s own work, however, never achieved the recognition and appreciation it deserves. Even today, Cotman’s startlingly innovative and beautiful landscapes remain relatively unknown to a wide portion of both the scholarly and general public. Cotman in the North: Watercolours of Durham and Yorkshire, David Hill’s highly detailed account of those formative years in Cotman’s career, is an attractive book with a wealth of excellent reproductions that should make Cotman’s work more accessible and compelling to many. Hill, a professor of Fine Arts at the University of Leeds, is also the author of several books on J.M.W. Turner, including Turner on the Thames (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993) and Turner in the North (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), that like the current volume place the artist’s work firmly in its social, historical, and especially its geographic context. Hill’s chapters are organized chronologically and by location: Part 1 of the book is entitled “Cotman’s First Visit to Yorkshire,” and part 2 is “At Home with the Cholmeleys: Scarborough, Brandsby and London, 1804–5.” While its meticulous, painstaking, minute-by-minute and mile-by-mile approach may be of interest and also helpful to the research of other scholars, Hill’s book remains more interesting for its richness of detail and wealth of information than for its theoretical insight.

The detail on which the book depends for both its content and structure is drawn from the correspondence of various members of the family with one another and with Cotman—from Mrs. Cholmeley’s day book which records the comings and goings of all the family and their friends and guests, to the occasional odd piece such as the poem that Anne Cholmeley wrote for Cotman. (Her younger sisters wrote a poem parodying Anne’s that is also included.) Cotman had met Mrs. Cholmeley at the family home, Brandsby Hall, in 1803 when he had gone on a sketching trip to Yorkshire with Paul Sandby Munn, a successful commercial artist and watercolorist some ten years older than Cotman. Munn along with Turner and Girtin belonged to an atelier organized by Dr. Thomas Monro, a physician who employed these artists and who was among the first to take an interest in Cotman’s work. There they had met Henry Charles Englefield, a prominent London bachelor, member of the Royal Society, and brother of Teresa Ann Cholmeley. Cotman, like most watercolorists of the day, needed to earn his living as a private drawing teacher, and it was in this capacity and also much like a member of the family that Cotman spent a good part of the next two years with the Cholmeleys. Hill provides the reader with what at times seems like a daily chronicle of the life of this family, a narrative filled with moments of interest and stretches of tedium. Daily life has its fascinations and usefulness, as Lenore Davidoff and Catherine Hall showed in their excellent Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). It could be useful, for example, to know whom Mrs. Cholmeley met in London society and how she contemplated marrying off her daughters. It is interesting to learn about her fears that Napoleon would invade England and that Yorkshire, on the eastern side of the country, would be more vulnerable to such an incursion. Nonetheless, the day-by-day accounting of the Cholmeleys’ life creates an unfocused narrative that rambles along pleasantly without any end in sight.

Even so, for the art lover and traveler as well as for the art historian, one of the charms of Hill’s book may be his identification and revisiting of seemingly every spot that Cotman sketched or painted during these years. Hill expects to find a one-to-one correspondence between a certain site and Cotman’s rendering of it; and if he does not, he accounts for it in one way or another, as he does here with Gormire Lake in Yorkshire: “Cotman’s watercolour bears only a very generalized resemblance to the place itself. . . . The lake is now thickly fringed with trees, and the slopes of the crags entirely covered. It seems very likely that the site was rather less wooded in 1803 . . .” (56). Hill thus tends to treat Cotman’s art as illustrative of his travels rather than as a thing in itself with its own interior agenda. Hill examines every sketch of Cotman’s made during a trip with Munn to Kirkstall Abbey in 1803. He suggests that a shadowy figure in the background of one of Cotman’s sketches of the Abbey’s interior may be Munn, because although Cotman had been sketching Munn outside, “perhaps a shower drove them indoors . . .” (45). This sort of unwarranted speculation seems to be related to the depth and breadth of Hill’s research, the extent of which leads him further and further from Cotman’s art even as it seems to lead him into the heart of it.

There are, however, occasions—such as in his reading of Drop Gate in Duncombe Park, 1805, one of Cotman’s most celebrated paintings—when Hill provides a reading that illuminates not only this work but also sheds light on Cotman’s whole practice. Hill observes of the painting that although “the washes are thin” and “extemporised in many places,” and “the pencil structure remains clearly visible everywhere,” even so, “everywhere the quality of the work is such as to suggest particularities being observed and the manner of their inclusion being considered” (97). Here, Hill’s excellent observation of the painting leads him to two important and related conclusions. The first is that Duncombe Park “is emphatically not a high-wrought object, nor is its subject. But it is an object that is highly conceptualized”; the second is that Duncombe Park “is a subject calculated to make us think of [Cotman’s] skill in the act of painting” (97). These two conclusions begin to move away from Hill’s consideration of Cotman’s work as travel narrative and biography, and away also from landscape itself as the ostensible subject matter of the landscape painting. Throughout his career Cotman’s focus on minor, non-iconographic aspects of the landscape made him less popular and less successful than many of his contemporaries such as Girtin and Turner. Cotman’s depictions of Kirkstall Abbey were as likely to be of one section of wall or one small gate as they were to be a recognizable monument, a souvenir of a visit. It is toward Cotman’s radicalism that Hill turns at this moment, toward the way in which in Cotman’s work the painting becomes the proper subject of painting.

One can see how sympathetic an environment the Cholmeleys provided for Cotman in Francis Cholmeley’s letter to him about Duncombe Park. Francis writes that Cotman’s customers emphatically disliked it because “it might have been anywhere,” and then goes on to observe that “Two thirds of mankind, you know . . . mind more what is represented than how it is done” (96; emphasis in original). The “minding” of how it is done was of course exactly what would have appealed a century-and-a-half later to that doyen of modernism, Clement Greenberg, who said in an interview that if you could not see how good Cotman was, “you can’t really see painting” (“Interview 1968 conducted by Edward Lucie-Smith,” in Clement Greenberg, Collected Essays and Criticism, IV: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–1969, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995, 279). When you look at Cotman you see painting; and although Hill’s book meanders slowly through a thicket of information, it does arrive in passing at this excellent view.