This is the second part of an article exploring Cotman’s association with St Benet’s Abbey, Norfolk.

In 1811 Cotman committed himself to a major series of etchings of Norfolk antiquarian subjects. The work was to become his primary preoccupation for the next five or six years, and he threw himself into it with several excursions into the depths of the Norfolk countryside in search of subjects. His travels seem to have taken him once again to St Benet’s Abbey, for the Norwich Castle Museum has a fine pencil sketch from about this time showing the windmill from the north.

In this drawing we can see that the windmill was by this time in use as a draining mill, for the water scoop is plainly visible at the bottom right. From this angle Cotman could concentrate on the intricacies of the structure and its workings. The vanes are turned towards us, although they are not in service because the sails are shown furled to the spar (ie the leading edge of the vane).

Cotman knew about windmills, knew the different types, the different types of sail, the varieties of purposes they served and the mechanics whereby such functions were delivered. And indeed until the advent of steam so would most countrymen, in the same way that anyone that lived near water would know about boats. Nowadays most of us know a windmill when we see one and have decided opinions about wind turbines, but really know almost nothing about them of any substance. Today, almost no-one would know what was the difference between a post mill, a tower mill and a smock mill, still less the difference between a common sail and a patent sail, or the different types of cap, and definitely nothing about how to make any of this work, or how to head the sails into the wind and get them turning.

Actually, even in Cotman’s time there were levels of ignorance of such matters. Even amongst professed artists; but Cotman made it a matter of artistic and professional pride to draw with a thorough understanding of whatever it was before him, and he was a specialist in windmills. In fact in most things Cotman set standards of discrimination that were beyond the ken of many, if not the majority, of his audience. In the matter of windmills, as with most such matters he emerges from the field with distinction.

Fortunately there are some excellent resources to inform us. A few years ago Timothy Wilcox (with Michael Pidgley, Michael Short and Jennifer Tann) put together a splendid exhibition called ‘The Romantic Windmill’ (Hove Museum and Art Gallery, 1993). The catalogue is well worth seeking out:

There is also a splendid resource just a click away.
http://www.norfolkmills.co.uk/windmills.html
This is an odyssey by Jonathan Neville to collate a pictorial and historical record of all the mills that can be traced in Norfolk.

St Benet’s Abbey, Norfolk, from the North Photograph by David Hill taken 7 March 2017, 11.46 GMT

John Sell Cotman (1782-1842) St Benet’s Abbey, Norfolk, from the north, c.1812 Graphite on white, wove paper, 288 x 213 mm; Norwich Castle Museum NWHCM : 1966.749.12 Image courtesy of Norfolk Museums To see this image in the Norfolk Museums’ own website, click on the following link, then use your browser’s ‘back’ button to return to this page: http://norfolkmuseumscollections.org/collections/objects/object-3727546919.html/#!/?q=cotman%2Bbenet

To return to the Norwich drawing, one obvious issue affecting windmills was the fact that they involve a great number of long spars of timber. The availability of timber, and the technology for cutting and processing it was fundamental to the design and character of the structure. In Cotman’s day, the availability of square-cut, long, straight, strong spars was a relatively recent condition. Older windmills were often made of anything-but-straight boughs. Even originally straight timbers had a habit of warping over time, with the result that many windmills were in an entertainingly deformed condition. The Liverpool and Port Sunlight watercolours show well the extremely long spars that were required to make the mechanism for turning the cap into the wind, or the very strong straight timbers that were required to make the sail spars. It is easy now to underestimate how crucial timbers of such length once were. It is interesting to compare a fully-restored Dutch example, with machined timbers, with the old hand-sawn and riven equivalents.

Click on any image to open in gallery, and read captions:

Dutch smock mill on the river Vecht at Maarssen, near Utrecht Photograph by David Hill taken 22 July 2015, 12.55 GMT

John Sell Cotman (1782-1842) St Benet’s Abbey, Norfolk, from the south-west , c.1808 Graphite and watercolour on white wove paper, 282 x 224 mm Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery: From the Lady Lever Art Gallery collections (LL 3946) Image courtesy of National Galleries on Merseyside. To see this image in the NGM’s own website, click on the following link, then use your browser’s ‘back’ button to return to this page: http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/walker/collections/works-on-paper/item-228178.aspx

after John Sell Cotman (1782-1842) St Benet’s Abbey, Norfolk, from the south-west , c.1808 Graphite and watercolour on white wove paper, 289 x 233 mm USA, San Francisco Fine Art Museums, Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, 1963.24.4 Image courtesy of Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts. To see this image in the San Francisco Fine Art Museums own website, click on the following link, then use your browser’s ‘back’ button to return to this page: https://art.famsf.org/john-sell-cotman/windmill-196324456

To judge from this drawing, St Benet’s was not without its idiosyncrasies. The staging was required to lift the turning platform to a sufficient height that the spars would reach from the cap. That alone appears to have been a major investment of labour and materials; though perhaps the result was never quite so sturdy as the miller might have preferred.

Once one begins to open up the topic of windmills, even a little, a door opens into a word full of its own poetry and insights. That, Cotman would have argued, is true of everything we might consider. He set himself to reward viewers of his work in proportion to the discrimination they brought to bear upon it. Sadly the approbation of informed viewing was bestowed most commonly by fellow artists and comparatively little by the buying public.

Next instalment: Cotman’s 1813 etching of St Benet’s

This is a further instalment in a series that retraces Cotman’s footsteps through his native county of Norfolk. Here we visit the isolated site of St Benet’s Abbey. This stands in a marshy plain near the junction of the rivers Ant and Bure about ten miles directly ENE of Norwich, but much further by road, south of the village of Ludham. The abbey has long since disappeared, but in the eighteenth century its gateway was pressed into service as the foundation and outbuildings of a tower windmill. This became one of the most important subjects to artists in Norfolk during the Romantic period, and for Cotman the subject for two of his greatest works.

Cotman sketched and painted windmills throughout his career. For him they articulated a poetry of relationship with the elements. He made dozens of works in which they figure. Many are arresting images, but in St Benet’s he found a composition that must be judged a masterpiece by anyone’s standards.

What is more, he found it in a quite unexpected place. For it is not in a watercolour or a painting, but rather in a line etching, and in a project whose objective was more antiquarian than artistic.

In 1811 Cotman embarked on a series of sixty etchings of architectural subjects in Norfolk. He was not so much interested in the grandest subjects such as Norwich Cathedral, but rather in out-of-the way curiosities, humble survivals down obscure back lanes and overgrown churchyards. St Benet’s satisfied all these preferences. Its site is flat Bure marshland north of Acle and today is approached down a narrow (but mostly surfaced) field track from Ludham, or for the majority of contemporary tourists, by boat. It stands in an ocean of space, and seems designed with the sole idea of pointing out the scale of the sky. St Benet’s, it has to be said, is a building of extremely incidental architectural or antiquarian interest. There was once a major medieval abbey here, although it is difficult to fathom quite why, since the site is pretty much without foundations. Unsurprisingly the abbey itself is now levelled to the sward. The only surviving historical structure is the abbey’s gatehouse redeveloped in the eighteenth century as the site of a windmill to grind rape seed, and then sometime in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century adapted as a wind pump to lift water from the surrounding grazing land into the river Bure.

Cotman made several visits to St Benet’s. The first is dateable to 1807 or 1808, and resulted in an upright watercolour at the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight recording the mill from the south west:

The view looks more-or-less directly across the face of the gatehouse to a distant postmill. If the distant mill ever existed, it would have been located near the junction of the Hundred Stream and the Thurne River, but there is nothing indicated in that north-east direction in the map of Norfolk published by William Faden in 1797.

Comparison of the watercolour with the surviving architecture shows that whilst Cotman carefully follows the general positioning of openings and the general masses, there is significant variation in specifics. The exact detail of the angle buttress to the right, for example, is altered, as is that of the embedded buttress at the foot of the tower. Cotman also suggests that the ground floor doorway to the tower was a Norman portal of stone, but in fact appears always to have been a more prosaic and functional brick. Today there are windmills visible to the east of St Benet’s on the river Thurne at Thurne, and Cotman could easily have been remembering one of those. Faden’s map indicates a ‘Drain Mill’ directly east of St Benet’s.

This watercolour is painted in a slightly naif style with well-defined washes and a frank sense of process that Cotman turned into a distinctive manner in the years about 1808. The style coincides with his first extended essays in oil painting, and also with the establishment of a series of drawings for circulation amongst his pupils. He advertised a series of six hundred of these in 1809, and the Lady Lever watercolour bears a number ‘1276’ that shows that eventually it took its place in the series. For the more advances students, who were practicing painting in watercolour, the frankness of the process would have made it a good example to copy.

The San Francisco Museum of Art has a version of the composition that is almost certainly such a copy by an able pupil:

The detail is followed carefully and in some respects, especially the foreground grasses, exceeds the original. The colour is generally more bold, and the sky altogether more dramatic. The quality of detail, particularly in the way that it understands the mechanics of the windmill is also impressive. The quality of the paintwork, however, lacks the delicacy that generally distinguishes the hand of John Sell Cotman, but we must nonetheless admit that this must have been a pupil of outstanding ability, very closely supervised, and one that had very well assimilated the artist’s approach.

Click on any image to open full size, with captions in gallery view:

St Benet’s Abbey from the south-west Photograph taken by David Hill, 7 March 2017, 11.23 GMT Click on image to view at full size.

John Sell Cotman (1782-1842) St Benet’s Abbey, Norfolk, from the south-west , c.1808 Graphite and watercolour on white wove paper, 282 x 224 mm Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery: From the Lady Lever Art Gallery collections (LL 3946) Image courtesy of National Galleries on Merseyside. To see this image in the NGM’s own website, click on the following link, then use your browser’s ‘back’ button to return to this page: http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/walker/collections/works-on-paper/item-228178.aspx

after John Sell Cotman (1782-1842) St Benet’s Abbey, Norfolk, from the south-west , c.1808 Graphite and watercolour on white wove paper, 289 x 233 mm USA, San Francisco Fine Art Museums, Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, 1963.24.4 Image courtesy of Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts. To see this image in the San Francisco Fine Art Museums own website, click on the following link, then use your browser’s ‘back’ button to return to this page: https://art.famsf.org/john-sell-cotman/windmill-196324456

This seems a good place to post what I’ve written thus far. I’ll come back to Cotman’s 1813 etching shortly. There will be other parts; I feel some serious windmill ruminations coming on…

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