pale and neutral, with a general character of buff stone, cold green trees, and pale, sketchy sky.

As a man, Hearne was distinguished by a good judgment, and a correct and retentive memory. His manners (his biographer says) were agreeable, gentlemanly, and modest." He died in Macclesfieldstreet, Soho, April 13, 1817.

Our third patriarch is Michael Rooker, the son of an engraver of architectural subjects, born 1743; thus he was Turner's senior by thirty-three years. He became a pupil of Paul Sandby, and in 1772 he exhibited a view of Temple Bar, which was considered meritorious. Loutherbourg was the scenepainter to Garrick at Drury-lane, and Rooker became scene-painter for the then little theatre in the Haymarket. In the summer Rooker broke loose from the din and smoke of London into the clear sunny country, and there made sketches for future finished drawings.

He made accurate drawings (anticipating Turner) for the headpieces of the Oxford almanacs; which he also engraved, receiving for each the very liberal sum, in those days, of fifty pounds. He relinquished this engagement some years before his death, taking a dislike to the toil of engraving.

Rooker died March 3rd, 1801, and was buried in the cemetery of St. Giles's-in-the-Fields. His drawings (during a sale of four days) produced the sum of 12407. Rooker was one of the first elected Associates of the Royal Academy.

My next water-colour pre-Adamite is Alexander Cozens, a Russian (foolish tradition says, an illegi

A BLOTTED PLATE.

83

timate son of Peter the Great) who settled in London as a drawing-master. He was a dash

ing, reckless painter, who never troubled nature much.

One of his fancies was to carry out a hint of Leonardo da Vinci, who used to get suggestions for landscapes from the stains on an old plastered wall. In an age when Hogarth painted from wax figures, and Gainsborough from pieces of moss and stones, Cozens would cover his paper or a china plate with blots and flourishes of paint, from which he afterwards, with an industrious folly, culled his landscape outlines, in disdain of Nature, who in vain spread her countless changing pictures around him.

Sometimes by chance, naïvely says Pilkington, "he elicited grand objects; but they were in general indefinite in their execution and unpleasing in colour."

Fool! why, it was as if an artist should go to sleep looking at the Bay of Naples, and then go home and paint the scene of his poor dream in wilful contempt for God's own handiwork.

This idealist published a tract upon this process, and another on the "Principles of Beauty relative to the Human Head," with plates by Bartolozzi, the great coadjutor of Cipriani. He also wrote an eccentric work on "the various species of composition in naCozens, like Paul Sandby, was for some time a fashionable drawing-master. He taught at Eton, and gave some lessons to George IV. when Prince of Wales. He died in 1786.

ture."

His father's position must have given his son, John

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THE COZENS MANNERS.

Cozens, a fair start in life. He abandoned his father's dreams and theories, and went at once to the only true instructress-Nature. His colour was pale; his trees, generally, of a tender willowy green; his distances of an evanescent pallid blue; but he was, nevertheless, a true artist, and carried his art many degrees further than his predecessors. He was careful and minute, and attempted atmospheric effects undreamt of by Hearne and Sandby.

He soon became a fashionable drawing-master, and the Cozens manner was a rage with the ladies of Queen Charlotte's dull court.

His greatest triumphs in art were obtained when making a tour with the young millionaire of Wiltshire, Beckford; a man of the most refined taste and of the most doubtful morals; a man who had been brought up with Pitt, who had gathered political wisdom from the Earl of Chatham, who learnt music from Mozart, and architecture from Sir William Chambers; a man who, at his majority (for the father, the democratic Lord Mayor, had died when the son was a child), came into a million of ready money and one hundred thousand a year.

Guided by and guiding the taste of the millionaire's genius, Cozens rambled, sketching, over Switzerland and Italy. His style became more ambitious, but at the same time more chaste, tender, thoughtful, and reflective. The view of a Glacier Valley,* executed at this time, is worthy of all praise for its multitude, breadth, and grand harmonious simplicity, as well

* Now in the admirable collection of that refined virtuoso, Mr. Bale, of Cambridge-terrace.

as for the dazzling purity of its colour. In other works of his* I find the most admirable taste, particularly in some curious Sicilian scenes: in a pale rosy sunset outside Rome, with St. Peter's a mere opaque mound of shadow, and quiet deer feeding dozily under the stone-pines of the Medici Gardens. Especially in a finished and minute drawing of an English country seat, with a beautiful distance of bosky receding hills.

Dr. Munro had many Cozens's, which Turner must have studied and thought over much; and some of which I know Girtin copied by the Doctor's wish. Amongst these were ten sketches of "Swiss and Italian Views," "View on the Coast near Naples," the "Bay of Salerno and Lake Nemi," the "Tomb of Virgil and Villa Sanazzaro," and "Scenes on the Neapolitan Coast."

In these were probably all the Cozens merits and defects. Amongst the defects: lumpy and shapeless trees, feebly defined; water pale; timid, and rather green skies; generally a rather feminine and small touch. Amongst the merits: miles of receding air, and a sublime sense of infinity, distance, and multitude, to which landscape art was hitherto, in any country, quite a stranger.

From Cozens, Turner learnt much, and indeed the poetry of his art descended from Cozens in lineal descent. Dayes had made him minute and careful.

* In Mr. Munro's and Mr. Girtin's collections. The former unsurpassed in Great Britain.

+ Fuseli says, "Cozens saw with an enchanted eye, and drew with an enchanted hand."

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ENDING IN A MADHOUSE.

From Nicholson (as he himself owned*), Sandby, Hearne, and Girtin he learnt much, as he did also from Wilson, Gainsborough, and Loutherbourg; but from Cozens he drew his first taste for the poetry of landscape, and for his special qualities of infinity, distance, and aërial perspective.

Poor Cozens died mad in 1799; whether from melancholy madness, or ambitious madness, I do not know. Mr. Henderson, of Montague-street, possesses his last work, an Italian scene, executed for his (Mr. Henderson's) father. It is feeble, and shows painful symptoms of a relaxing hand and an enfeebled brain. The water is rippled in a hesitating way that implies the extreme doubt with which it was executed. But still, over even this last effort, there is the tender air of poetry which characterizes all that Cozens executed.

Poor Cozens died in the madhouse under the care of the very Dr. Munro who patronized Turner and his young friend Girtin. Art has not sent many of its votaries to that dreadful valley of the shadow of death, but Cozens, Newton, and Dadd were, alas; among those few.

Cozens washed in his effects on the spot. His cloud and distant mountain tints he compounded of Indian red, a small portion of lake, indigo, and yellow ochre; in the middle distance he used diluted black, and his foregrounds were chiefly of black and burnt umber. His distant trees he toned down with the warm washes used in his skies, and those nearer still with yellow ochre, indigo, and sometimes burnt sienna;

* To his friend Mr. Munro, of Hamilton-place.