(b Norwich, 16 May 1782; d London, 24 July 1842). English painter and etcher.

Cotman was born in the parish of St Mary Coslany, Norwich, the son of Edmund Cotman, a hairdresser, later a haberdasher, 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.

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Cotman, John Sell (1782-1842). Architect, draughtsman, landscape and water-colour painter. The son of a prosperous silk-mercer in Norwich, he was intended for his father's business, but preferring art, went to London to study in 1798. He exhibited at the Royal Academy 1800-6, before returning to Norwich in 1807 to open a school for drawing and design. He joined the Norwich Society of Artists, becoming president in 1811. He is now seen as a most original artist, with the water-colour Greta Bridge (1805) probably his masterpiece.

(kŏt'mən) , 1782–1842, English landscape painter and etcher. He was a leading representative of the Norwich school. Cotman studied in London and in 1806 settled in Norwich where he opened an art school. He suffered periods of melancholia throughout his life. He took up etching c.1810 and produced several series of etchings of English, and later French, antiquities. His Liber Studiorum (1838) is an outstanding work in this medium. For the last nine years of his life he was a drawing master at King's College, London. Although Cotman's work was but little appreciated in his day, it is now highly prized for its fine color, decorative and structural qualities, and sustained poetic mood. He is best known for his watercolors and drawings, of which the British Museum possesses many, including the famous Greta Bridge. Cotman's oil paintings are in many British galleries.

Bibliography

See catalog by V. G. R. Rienaecker (1953).

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