Ind-E-Focus

The Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery is currently holding an exhibition of the work of Birmingham born artist David Cox. Richard Dorment of the Telegraph gives an insight into the works of this prolific landscape artist;

The son of a blacksmith who was born in a poor suburb of Birmingham in 1783,

the landscape painter David Cox made his name as a young man by taking odd jobs in the art world's Grub Street – as a scene painter, by selling views of London and Thames to booksellers at two guineas the dozen, by teaching (for years in a boarding school for young ladies), and even by publishing a famous "how-to-paint" manual for students.

A major show of his work at the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery reveals an artist with solid technique who, during his long life, turned out a body of work still astonishing for its range.

For 32 years he lived in the provinces, with annual visits to London to keep up with the careers of his great contemporaries Turner, Constable and Bonnington. Like them, he had a genius for capturing in paint the changeable English weather, which he observed on his journeys through Lancashire, Wales, Derbyshire and the Lakes. Just as Constable will always be associated with the landscape of the Stour Valley, so Cox is best known for his views of travellers making their way over the treacherous sands between Ulverston and Morecambe Bay, and for his many studies of the town of Betws-y-Coed in Wales.

The moment he travelled abroad to Belgium, Holland, and France, he turned his attention away from landscape to paint the palaces and bridges of capital cities and crumbling buildings in ancient market towns.

Only in 1839, at the age of 56, did Cox learn to paint in oils, but within a couple of years he had become so proficient in the medium he could give up teaching and move out of London. For the final 18 years of his life, 1841-1859, he devoted himself to painting full time.

In good weather Cox worked directly from nature, but only for watercolours and sketches. His oils were painted indoors, but you'd never guess it when looking at a picture such as Rhyl Sands, a depiction of life at the seaside that's as fresh as anything by Boudin.

Cox is a painter of sudden showers, big skies, scudding clouds and sun rising through mist over wet sand. The beautifully drawn figures who confront the elements often make their way through empty landscapes under driving rain. But I don't think we should read too much into the whiff of melancholy you sometimes pick up from these images. Cox was a realist: travel at this period was hard; this is just the way things were.

I hope this wonderful exhibition gets the audience it deserves, but for those who can't see it in person, the catalogue by Scott Wilson and others does full justice to this under-appreciated British master.

Until May 3. Information: 0121 303 2834. (Source:Telegraph.co.uk - David Cox exhibition - review By Richard Dorment)