Samuel Bellin after Sir John Watson-Gordon Portrait of Artist David Cox

An original 1855 mezzotint print, Samuel Bellin after Sir John Watson-Gordon, Portrait of Artist David Cox.

This fine large mezzotint portrait of the English watercolourist David Cox OWS (1783–1859) was engraved by the London printmaker Samuel Bellin (1799–1893) after an oil painting by Sir John Watson Gordon PRSA RA (1788–1864).

The Scottish portraitist Watson Gordon was particularly successful in portraying the artists, literati, and intellectuals of his day. The Cox portrait, painted in the 1850s, represents the high point of the final phase of Watson Gordon's career, when he adopted a more spartan style, using muted colour and a cool light. The restrained elegance of the portrait is expertly translated into mezzotint by Samuel Bellin, who was one of the leading workers in the medium. Bellin had trained under the Huguenot James Basire the younger before spending several years in Rome, where he came to know J.M.W. Turner, Frederick Catherwood and Bertel Thorvaldsen. While in Rome he made some excellent copies of celebrated pictures, and acquired great facility as a draughtsman. On his return to London he made his career producing prints from pictures by popular English painters of the day.

David Cox is represented here as an elder statesman, aged seventy-two, by which time he was, alongside Peter De Wint and Copley Fielding, recognised as one of the leading figures of the English landscape watercolour style of the first half of the 19th century. He had for some time been able to abandon his work as a drawing master and relocate to Greenfield House in Harborne outside Birmingham, to pursue the higher levels of freedom and experimentation that were to characterise his later work. The simplicity of composition focuses attention acutely on the sitter and affords Cox the dignity that his artistic stature commands.

Signed in the plate by the sitter below the image.

Image size: 40.2 x 32.5cm. Sheet size: 48.9 x 38cm. Presented in a smart cream window mount (55.7 x 40.5cm).

Provenance: Bill Thomson, Esq (Albany Gallery). Exh.: D. Cox Exhibition (presumed to be the 1983 Bicentenary Exhibition, Birmingham Museums And Art Gallery).