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Description: | A reproduction produced by the Vasari Society of a drawing by Alexander Cozens. The drawing is made with brush strokes, and shows a landscape with a stone bridge curving over some water. Two people are crossing the bridge, one of whom has a stick and is herding some cattle across. There are tall trees are to the left of the bridge.
Text from the accompanying booklet produced by the Vasari Society:
"20.
ALEXANDER COZENS
(Worked from 1742; d. 1786)
LANDSCAPE WITH A BRIDGE
Collection of Henry Oppenheimer, Esq. Drawn with the brush in ink and lamp-black on thin varnished paper. 23.9 x 38.8 cm. (9 3/8 x 15 1/4 in.).
The drawings is executed in the ink fortified with lamp-black, and on the paper made transparent with turpentine varnish, which Cozens prescribed for use in tracing from his 'Blots'. Drawings from blots, however, would retain no indication of their origin, and there is every reason to think that those details of technique were not confined to his work in this process. The extreme simplicity of the main composition might have suggested that it was intended for a drawing copy - the evidence of the Wrest Park Collection, indeed, points to his having given lessons to the family - were it not that the mount and the inscription upon it, 'Cozens delin:' are not Cozens's own but in the style and handwriting of one of the collectors of the Wrest Park drawings towards the end of the eighteenth century. But the simple composition can be quite adequately explained, on intrinsic grounds, as a vehicle or foil to the elaborate and subtle effects, in mass and detail, of light and shade. These are heightened by the contrast between the cool greys and dead blacks of the ink, and the warm tone of the varnished paper. Of course the luminosity of atmosphere and variety of pattern which result from the contrasts of tones are to some extent lost in the reproduction.
A. P. O.
[For Cozens's method of composition by 'Blots', see A. P. Oppé, Fresh Light on Alexander Cozens, Print-Collector's Quarterly, VIII, p. 61 (April, 1921). ED.]"
Technique: reproduction
Reproduction by the Vasari Society of a drawing by Alexander Cozens, Landscape with a bridge (1921.44). | Source: | Manchester City Galleries | Identifier: | mcag.emu.ecatalogue.103987 | Go to resource |
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