The painter David Cox, who helped define the halcyon years of British watercolor, was born on this day in 1783. A member of the Birmingham School — progenitor of late-19th century French Impressionist schools—Cox exhibited at the Royal Academy for more than 50 years, and his paintings are held in the collections of the Louvre, the British Museum, the Tate Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum, as well as the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Notably (and uniquely for the time), Cox painted on an especially rough wrapping paper that was nonabsorbent, allowing the pigments of his watercolor paint to sit (and dry) on the surface, lending his compositions a richness not found in his contemporaries. Another technique? He used black chalk to sketch out his paintings first, rather than graphite pencils, which created greater definition and, when blended with the watercolors, chiaroscuro. Pictured: David Cox’s c. 1850 painting “Moonlight Landscape,” held by the Yale Center for British Art (image in the public domain).
NCPA
