David Cox Snr. (1783-1859) - 1842 Watercolour The Dairy Farm

Description

This accomplished watercolour study depicts a working dairy farm in the 19th century. To the foreground a man ushers cattle across the yard while two milk maids cross paths at the door to the farm cottage. Completed in fine detail, capturing the charming essence of rural life. Signed and dated to the lower left. Beautifully presented in an ornate gilt frame with leaf and berry moulding. Artist name and dates inscribed to the mount. On watercolour paper.

Condition

The condition is typical for a picture of this age including some discolouration. There are some very light foxing marks to to the upper half of the painting.

Size

32.5 x 47.5cm (12.8" x 18.7")
Framed Size: 58.5 x 74cm (23" x 29.1")

Artist Biography

David Cox Snr. OWS (1783-1859) was an English landscape painter, one of the most important members of the Birmingham School of landscape artists and an early precursor of Impressionism. He is considered one of the greatest English landscape painters and a major figure of the Golden Age of English watercolour. Although most popularly known for his works in watercolour, he also painted over 300 works in oil towards the end of his career.

Cox exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy from 1805. By 1810 he was elected President of the Associated Artists in Watercolour. In 1812, following the demise of the Associated Artists, he was elected an associate of the Society of Painters in Watercolour (the old Watercolour Society). He was elected a Member of the Society in 1813, and exhibited there every year (except 1815 and 1817) until his death.

By the 1840s Cox, alongside Peter De Wint and Copley Fielding, had become recognised as one of the leading figures of the English landscape watercolour style of the first half of the 19th century. This judgement was complicated by reaction to the rougher and bolder style of Cox's later Birmingham work, which was widely ignored or condemned. While by this time De Wint and Fielding were essentially continuing in a long-established tradition, Cox was creating a new one. John Ruskin in 1857 condemned the work of the Society of Painters in Water-colours as 'a kind of potted art, of an agreeable flavour, suppliable and taxable as a patented commodity', excluding only the late work of Cox, about which he wrote 'there is not any other landscape which comes near these works of David Cox in simplicity or seriousness'.