Cley Church, Norfolk
1818
Medium
Graphite and gray wash on ivory wove paper
Dimensions
17.3 × 26.9 cm (6 13/16 × 10 5/8 in.)
Classification
graphite
Department
Prints and Drawings
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
218476
Rights
Public Domain
About this artwork
Unlike academic, London-based painters who romanticized the English countryside, John Cotman and other members of the Norwich School painted landscapes in their immediate surroundings. This drawing of Saint Margaret’s in the village of Cley-next-the-Sea exhibits Cotman’s heightened attention to perspective and architectural detail as opposed to vegetation and atmospheric effects. Drawings such as this one allowed Cotman to translate his renderings of historic architecture into printed form. Betw...
About the Artist
John Sell Cotman · 1782–1842
John Sell Cotman (1782–1842) was one of the most original and technically innovative English watercolorists of his generation, a central figure of the Norwich School whose bold, flattened compositions and luminous washes of color place him among the most modern-feeling of early nineteenth-century British artists. Born in Norwich, Norfolk, Cotman moved to London as a young man and studied in the ci...