Norman Travels

I finally got round to going to the Dulwich Gallery’s show on John Sell Cotman in Normandy.   In fact a substantial number of the pictures in the show aren’t by Cotman at all while not all the Cotmans depict Normandy- and the catalogue looks as if it was prepared for a much smaller and more narrowly focused show with little coverage of the “extraneous” artists and themes.   This doesn’t spoil the exhibition, however.

In his day (meaning in the 1820’s and 30’s), many art experts ranked Cotman above JMW Turner- a remarkable achievement for a man whose career trajectory was mostly provincial (he lived and worked in Norwich for much of his life).  He was one of a clutch of English artists active in the early 19^th century who were instrumental in taking watercolour from being basically a medium for preparatory sketch work to a genre in its own right.  He also played a part in the revaluation of medieval art and, particularly, architecture in progress in the years around the turn of the 19^th century; his visits to Normandy and the work he did there played into that wider agenda.

It takes some mental effort for someone whose academic background lies in medieval studies to remember that what are now basic, self-evident, concepts like Romanesque and Gothic styles of architecture were still in the process of being defined less than two hundred years ago and that even well educated people with a profound interest in the past could find it very hard to “place” buildings in their correct chronological context.  It was, for instance, widely believed that no buildings survived from the Anglo-Saxon period but that buildings erected well after 1066 were nevertheless examples of a “Saxon” style (a view which saw Durham cathedral characterised as a “Saxon “ building in some accounts).  There were major debates over when and where the pointy-arched Gothic style came from – was it an English development which exported to France or vice versa?   Given that this debate was going on in the middle of the Napoleonic wars it’s not surprising that nationalism played a role.  The surprising (and actually rather impressive) element is how limited its role was; the most aggressively Francophobic commentator was slapped down hard by senior members of the Society of Antiquaries in the middle of the war in a way that I don’t think would have happened a hundred years later had a similar dispute arisen over the respective roles of Britain and Germany in a major cultural development.

Obviously with a war going on it was rather difficult to go off and have a look at the evidence in France.  After 1815, however, things were rather different.   Cotman had already had a degree of success with books of engravings of the ancient buildings and other notable antiquities of his native Norfolk and was also known for atmospheric water colours of romantic ruins.   More to the point, perhaps, his main patron and employer, Dawson Turner (no relation to JMW) was a man of wide interests which included antiquarianism.  Turner took an interest in the debates about historic architecture and had a number of contacts in Normandy to whom he could give Cotman introductions which would open doors for him (sometimes quite literally).   Indeed Cotman’s planned work on Norman antiquities was quite explicitly cast as a contribution to improved post-war relations and (in modern terms) a piece of cultural diplomacy designed to underline the antiquity and strength of the cultural links between England and France in general and Normandy and East Anglia in  particular.   Turner’s French contacts were elite figures of broadly royalist sympathies who had gone into exile during the Revolution; in principle ideal partners for this enterprise.  It didn’t quite work out like that- Turner ultimately fell out very badly with his key French contact over matters related to money- but this did not impact much on Cotman’s travels.

Cotman made three visits to Normandy in 1817, 1818 and 1820.   He travelled surprisingly widely given the shortcomings of the transport infrastructure in Restoration France, which condemned him to rumble across the countryside in the notoriously slow and uncomfortable wooden-wheeled “diligence” post coaches.   Life could be uncomfortable away from the major cities; he was arrested as a spy on one occasion (presumably nobody had told the local police the war was over…) and had to abandon sketching one church under a hail of stones thrown by local beggars disgruntled that he hadn’t bought them off.   On the second trip he spent part of his time with Mrs Turner and her daughters (his drawing pupils); this too was problematic as he clearly didn’t tug his forelock enough to the boss’ wife, who complained to her husband about his lack of deference.  She fancied herself as something of an artist in her own right- Cotman sketched her sketching the sculptural decoration of a church door, perhaps as a peace offering.   He never quite managed to cover all the ground he hoped to and sometimes had to rush past places, only to realise later that he should have given them more attention (and occasionally pass off images culled from the works of others as his own to fill the gaps).  Getting good viewpoints could be a struggle; he had to rely on Mrs Turner’s assistance in persuading a Rouen shopkeeper to let him sketch the south door of the cathedral from the upstairs section of the shop.  For all that he appears to have enjoyed the visits and he certainly was very proud of the four volumes of engravings which he published on Norman antiquities- a late portrait of Cotman shows him holding one of them.

The Normandy was still emerging from the upheavals of the Revolution and the Napoleonic regime.   Though not as uniformly and vehemently “white” (i.e. counter-revolutionary) in sentiment as neighbouring Brittany or the Vendee, it had seen its share of fighting in the civil wars of the 1790’s and its economy had suffered badly from the British blockade and Napoleonic Continental System which had in effect shut down maritime trade for a couple of decades.  Castles and religious buildings had been damaged both in fighting and in the dechristianisation policies of the Jacobin republic in 1793-4.  Monastic buildings in particular had been taken over for all manner of secular uses, from cotton spinning workshops to prisons, and remained secularised even under the restored monarchy.

Cotman’s artistic response to this context is muted.  There are very few explicit references to damage inflicted during the revolutionary era in his works.  He did take advantage of temporary roofing put into the church of the Abbaye aux Dames at Caen when it was converted into a military storehouse to get much closer to architectural details than would otherwise have been possible and his depictions of interiors in Mont St Michel make very oblique reference to the monastery’s current function as a prison by tucking members of the military unit who acted as guards into corners to give a sense of scale.   His later watercolours working up sketches he had made into independent pieces take the same line.  The mounted military police interrogating locals in the foreground of the view of Mont St Michel (see top) or even the very well stocked junk shop in the view of Alencon below could be seen as veiled comments on recent history, but ones so subtle as to be very easily overlooked (the junk shop is presumably well stocked with property looted from the nobility and churches which has floated loose into the commercial sphere, possibly after passing through several intervening owners).   This low key approach perhaps reflects the rather fluid attitudes of many in the English elite to recent events in France.   Violent dechristianisation was clearly a bad thing but did that entirely negate traditional English Protestant attitudes to Roman Catholicism?   One of Dawson Turner’s letters suggests that he had no problems with the Revolution turfing monks out of their monastery and the building’s subsequent use as a cotton mill but others were coming round to the view that atheist republicanism was in fact a worse threat than Popery.   Were ruined chateaux monuments to the blind violence of the mob or the sadly predictable pay-back for generations of seigneurial oppression?   Even apparently less contentious developments were changing the townscape of Normandy almost before Cotman’s eyes- a rather magnificent late medieval house in Rouen which he sketched in 1817 had been knocked down by 1820 as a result of economic recovery.   At times there is a rather contemporary sense of recording a fragile and potentially transitory situation for posterity in Cotman’s work.

For all Cotman’s pride in his Norman work, it didn’t provide either fame or fortune.   The four volumes of his study lingered in the publisher’s warehouse for lack of sales and were eventually (in modern terms) remaindered.  Cotman, it seems, had rather misjudged the market.   His books, which were put together in a rather unsystematic and haphazard way, struggled to find a market niche.  They were not quite lavishly illustrated enough to satisfy the 19^th century equivalent of the coffee table market- the colourful, bustling streetscapes of Samuel Prout were much more fun and set the slightly crumbling architecture in a much clearer human context.   They were not structured enough to satisfy the market for travel writing- especially as several other writer/artist teams were also producing work focussed on Normandy in the same period.   They did not even entirely meet the requirements of the scholarly/antiquarian market; the text was a rush job done at the last minute by Dawson Turner, who appears to have been a better botanist than architectural historian and hadn’t seen all the places depicted in the books personally.  Perhaps Cotman’s apparent preference for Romanesque architecture over Gothic was a little out of key with contemporary tastes (it’s interesting that Cotman’s contemporaries represented in the Dulwich show appear to have focussed much more on the region’s Gothic heritage).  

Neither were the free standing watercolours which he worked up from his sketches a huge success; they sold for decent but not outstanding prices and in the end he sold on most of his preparatory sketches.   They were criticised as garish and compared unfavourably with the English landscapes which had made his reputation.   Some of them would certainly have looked rather strange to contemporary eyes, albeit for reasons which contributed to Cotman’s return to favour in the 20^th century- the distinctly Cubist distortions of his account of the landscape round Domfront could be read in a very forward-looking light (see below).   Despite the mixed success of its artistic outcomes, Normandy stayed with Cotman for many years as he worked themes seen during his visits there into his later art- though in increasingly fanciful ways floating free from any anchoring in observed Norman realities.  He never went abroad again.