Drawings of David Cox

Excerpt: The greatest artists have expressed themselves so completely in their works, that the story of their lives adds little or nothing to our knowledge of their personality. We know very little about the life of Turner—almost as little, indeed, as we know of Shakespeare’s—but in neither case do we seem to have missed anything that would add to our comprehension or enjoyment of their work. With Turner, as with Shakespeare, his art was the perfect organ of his spirit. His pictures enshrine more of the real personality of the artist than even a biographer of genius with unlimited opportunities could tell us. But though this is almost invariably true of the greatest artists, it is not true of all artists. It is hardly the case with David Cox. His hampered, thwarted art is indeed replete with glimpses and hints of the personality behind it; but without a commentary it is not very eloquent or very likely to arrest attention. The artist’s life furnishes the needed commentary. The beautiful simplicity and naïveté of the man’s character, the mean circumstances in which his life was cast, the fortitude, industry, and manliness with which he triumphed over his difficulties—these things explain much that seems at first sight futile in his art and colour even his worst failures with a glow of purely human sympathy. And the works of his old age—his most eloquent and self-subsistent productions, i.e., the works of Cox that stand least in need of a commentary—these lose nothing of their compelling power from the spectator’s consciousness of the difficulties through which the artist’s spirit had to struggle towards self-realisation and expression.