Born on 16 May 1782: John Sell Cotman, English Romantic painter and etcher who died on 24 July 1842, specialized in Landscapes. He was the father of John Joseph Cotman and Miles Edmund Cotman; and the uncle of Frederic George Cotman.
Cotman was born in the parish of Saint Mary Coslany, Norwich, the son of Edmund Cotman, a hairdresser, later a haberdasher [but never a maker or seller of cots], and Ann Sell. In 1793 he entered Norwich Grammar School as a ‘freeplacer’. In 1798 he moved to London, where he worked as an assistant to the publisher Rudolph Ackermann. Following in the footsteps of Turner and Thomas Girtin he joined Dr Monro’s ‘Academy’ in 1799 and became a member of the sketching society that had developed around the personality and talent of Girtin. He exhibited at the Royal Academy for the first time in 1800, when he was awarded the large silver palette by the Society of Arts.
Cotman has been considered the best watercolorist of his generation. Although his career was not cut short like so many of the famous Romantics -- Keats, Girtin, Schubert -- it was curiously aborted; his best work was done in the first decade of the century when, under the influence of Girtin, he produced a remarkable series of watercolors characterized by firm drawing, delicate washes, and an uncanny sense of design. Atmosphere doesn't play a strong role in Cotman's work; light does. Cotman had a unique ability to give masses and shadows a kind of equivalence in the design which in some respects prefigures Cubism, a full century in the future. In his latter years, Cotman was troubled by fits of depression and this, combined with relative isolation in Norfolk (he was one of the founders of the "Norwich School") led him away from his genius to pursue the influence of Turner and what Ruskin came to call "The Turnerian sublime." Cotman died in London.
Among Cotman's students were George Devey, Dawson Turner, and William Burges, who also did his early work in Cotman's studio.
