Alexander Cozens's New Method: The Blot and General Nature

Author(s): Charles A. Cramer

Source: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 79, No. 1 (Mar., 1997), pp. 112-129
Published by: College Art Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3046232 .
Accessed: 12/09/2014 11:12

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

College Art Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Art
Bulletin.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Fri, 12 Sep 2014 11:12:20 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Alexander Cozens's New Method:
The Blot and General Nature
CharlesA. Cramer
Born in 1717 to English parents in Peter the Great's Russia,
Alexander Cozens was educated from the age of ten in
London, where he remained until a brief return to Russia in
the late 1730s or early 1740s.1 In 1746 he was among the first
English artists to go to Italy, where he studied under Claude-
Joseph Vernet. Between 1749 and 1754 Cozens was drawing
master to Christ's Hospital in London, and by the mid-1760s
he was at Eton, where he taught both Sir George Beaumont
and the famous autobiographer Henry Angelo. Although
only nine oil paintings can be attributed to him with any
certainty, Cozens exhibited regularly at the Society of Arts, the
Free Society of Artists, and the Royal Academy. It is not for his
finished oils, however, that Cozens is remembered today, but
for his drawings and theories, and for his direct or indirect
1/,,, ,7
1 Alexander Cozens, SimpleBeauty,burin engraving, from
Principlesof Beauty,London, 1777-78, pl. 1. New Haven,
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library,Yale University
(photo: Beinecke Library)
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Fri, 12 Sep 2014 11:12:20 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
influence on many of the most celebrated landscape artists of
the English tradition.
Cozens was the author of four major treatises on what could
be called "practical aesthetics." In his treatise on The Shape,
Skeleton and Foliage of Thirty-twoSpecies of Treesfor the Use of
Painting and Drawing (1771) he attempted to fix the basic
forms characterizing trees for the use of landscape painters.
His Principles of Beauty Relative to the Human Head (1777-78)
was an exemplar of expression, consisting mostly of nineteen
plates, one showing the "Simple Beauty" of a woman in
profile (Fig. 1) and the other eighteen showing various
formal modifications to that profile that would serve to
illustrate some specific "character" (for example, "The
Artful," Fig. 2). Another of his major treatises, The Various
---'
:"?~ I
2 Cozens, TheArtful,burin engraving, from Principlesof Beauty,
London, 1777-78, pl. 16. New Haven, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Library,Yale University (photo: Beinecke Library)

Speciesof Compositionof Landscape in Nature, has survived only
in fragments.
Today, the best known of Cozens's theories is his descrip-
tion of how to form landscape compositions starting from a
blot. This method was first published by Cozens in 1759 as An
Essay to Facilitate the Inventing of Landskips, Intendedfor Students
in the Arts, and again with a more thorough theoretical
apparatus in 1785 under the title A New Method of Assisting the
Invention in Drawing Original Compositionsof Landscape.2 It is
with the last-mentioned that I will be principally concerned
here. The blot (Figs. 3, 7, 8, 9) was a sort of first indication of a
landscape, hastily produced in thick, black ink on white
paper, from which the artist could later elaborate a finished
composition. In Cozens's own words, the blot is "swift,"
"suggestive," "instantaneous," "accidental," "casual," and
"rude." Our eyes confirm these adjectives; his blots are
among the most surprising artistic products of the century.
Both the method of blotting and the product seem utterly
anomalous to the contemporaneous context of the highly
rational classicism of the newly founded Royal Academy
under the presidency ofJoshua Reynolds. Indeed, the method
and the product are only slightly less surprising when consid-
ered in the context of the highly inventive and fruitful school
of British landscape painting around the turn of the century.
Symptomatically, art historians have had the utmost diffi-
culty in dealing with Cozens and his blots, tending to displace
them to nearly any period and culture other than his own.3 In
the 1950s in France, Henri Lemaitre asserted that "Alexander
Cozens's experiments of the 1740s and 50s presaged the art
that we would later call 'abstract,' " and also cited the
influence of "the Far East" on his technique.4 Louis Hawes in
1969 compared Cozens's depictions of cloudy skies to "a
Clyfford Still canvas turned on its side.'"5 E. H. Gombrich and
Henri Zerner both linked the blots to the famous psychologi-
cal test introduced by Hermann Rorschach in 1921, and
Zerner complemented this anachronism by citing the roots of
Cozens's method in the seventeenth-century practice of
Baroque artists who would "throw the first thoughts of their
compositions in masses of light and shade."6 The problem
underlying these anachronistic attempts to account for Coz-
ens's work is the emphasis placed on the final formal
The ideas in this essay are further elaborated in my Ph.D. dissertation,
"Formal Reduction and the Empirical Ideal, 1750-1914," intended for
completion by the summer of 1997. Unless otherwise indicated, translations
are mine.
1. The following brief biography is based on Kim Sloan's extensive primary
research in her two-part "New Chronology for Alexander Cozens," Burlington
Magazzne, cxxvii, nos. 983 and 987, 1985, 70-75 and 354-63; and in her book
Alexander and John Robert Cozens: The Poetry of Landscape, New Haven/London,
1986.
2. A transcription of Cozens's New Methodis available in Adolph Paul Oppe,
Alexander andJohn RobertCozens,Cambridge, Mass., 1954, 165-87; in Joshua C.
Taylor, ed., Nineteenth-Century Theorzesof Art, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London,
1987, 63-71; and in Jean-Claude Lebensztejn's L'art de la tache:Introductzond la
Nouvelle methode d'AlexanderCozens,Paris, 1990, 467-84 and plates. Citations
from the New Method in this essay are taken from Lebensztejn's text but will
carry Cozens's page numbers (included in the margins of Lebensztejn's
reprint). Lebensztejn's text is the preferable source, since it also includes
reproductions of all the aquatint plates accompanying the original publication
and a very extensive primary and secondary bibliography, which is invaluable
to the general scholarship of the eighteenth century as well as to the "Cozens
problem."
3. Barbara Mana Stafford's work on Cozens is a significant exception to this
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Fri, 12 Sep 2014 11:12:20 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
ALEXANDER COZENS'S NEW METHOD 113
appearance of the blots, to the exclusion of the theory of
artistic process that produced their forms.7
Recent theoretical treatments have not been much more
successful. In a double fallacy, James B. Twitchell's Romantic
Horizons suggests that Cozens's method resulted from "youth-
ful impetuosity" (Cozens was already forty-two by the time he
first codified his system of blotting in 1759) and repeats the
commonplace assertion that "there is something singularly
romantic about Cozens."8 Even Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, in
his exhaustive "Introduction to the New Methodof Alexander
Cozens," finds it necessary to account for Cozens from
outside his "historical anchorage." Although meticulous in
its primary research, Lebensztejn's first chapter concedes, "if
the object that we are attempting to situate is first and
foremost an object of surprise, of eccentricity, we must not
forget that 'surprise' brings with it the depths [fond] in which
that object is anchored."' Cozens's work, it seems, is so
theoretically and formally suggestive that at any moment, with
or perhaps without the intention of the historian, it evades the
context of its own culture and turns up in other centuries and
other places.
I will argue here that it is possible to understand Cozens's
technique of blotting within its "historical anchorage," that
of the burgeoning picturesque school of English landscape
and even that of the classically inclined Royal Academy. In
fact, understanding the relation of the blot to contemporane-
ous British academic classicism-counterintuitive as it seems-
will help to restore to that most long-lived of Western art styles
some of the adaptive flexibility that was certainly a condition
of its longevity. The displacement of Cozens from his classiciz-
ing culture is symptomatic of the tendency of modernism and
modernist historiography to arrogate all formal innovation to
itself and its privileged history, leaving academic classicism an
improbably stale and spent art form for much of its life. My
reconsideration of Cozens in this article will center on the
importance of what I will call the "techniques of generaliza-
tion" proper to classicism in the context of eighteenth-
century empirical epistemology (the theory of knowledge).
Cozens's New Method is a rather disjunctive mixture of very
concrete technical issues (such as how to make drawing ink)
and very abstruse philosophical issues (such as the nature of
rule, although the context she explores is a very broad contemporaneous
European debate on the semiotics of the accidental, and is perhaps less
aesthetic than scientific; Stafford, "Characters in Stones, Marks on Paper:
Enlightenment Discourse on Natural and Artificial Taches," ArtJournal, XLIV,
no. 3, 1984, 233-40.
4. Henri Lemaitre, Lepaysage anglazs d l'aquarelle, 1760-1851, Paris, 1955, 11,
93-94.
5. Louis Hawes, "Constable's Sky Sketches," Journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Instztutes,xxxII, 1969, 349 n. 20.
6. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illuszon: A Study zn the Psychology of Pzctorial
Representatzon,Princeton, N.J., 1989, 183; Henri Zerner, "Alexander Cozens et
sa methode pour l'lnvention des paysages," L'Oeil, no. 137, 1966, 29, 32-33.
7. The methodological underpinnings of this article, which can broadly be
seen as an attempt to describe "style" through a typology of artistic "process"
rather than a taxonomy of the final formal appearance of artistic "products,"
is suggested in Kendall L. Walton, "Style and the Products and Processes of
Art," in The ConceptofStyle, ed. Berel Lang, rev. ed., Ithaca, N.Y./London, 1987,
72-103.
8. James B. Twitchell, RomantzcHorizons:Aspectsof the Sublimezn EnglzshPoetry
and Pazntzng, 1770-1850, Columbia, Mo., 1983, 138, 157. The New Method,
which Twitchell cites, was published when Cozens was sixty-eight.
9. Lebensztejn (as in n. 2), 29.
114 ART BULLETIN MARCH 1997 VOLUME LXXIX NUMBER
1167
/ II? I 1%
b'- "C i YR
.- -'1
%,
artistic genius). The concept of "generalization" links these
issues, describing Cozens's interventions in both issues of
technique (and hence form) and epistemological issues
common also to contemporaneous academic classical art.
The "Blot," the "Sketch" and the Landscape Drawing
We will begin here with the technical aspects of Cozens's
method in order to shift our emphasis from the blot as final
formal product to the blot as a stage in an overall artistic
process. We will then better be able to compare that process
with the academic classical process and the picturesque
process, even if its product seems at first sight incompatible
with both. The technical aspects of blotting are outlined by
Cozens in five "Rules" following the epistemological appara-
tus of the New Method (20-31). Rule I describes how "to make
Drawing Ink." Rule II tells how "to make Transparent Paper,"
which would be laid over the blot to make the sketch based on
its forms. Rule III gives instruction on how to make a blot,
Rule IV how to extrapolate the blot into a landscape sketch,
and Rule V how to "finish" that sketch.
Cozens lists three steps to the formation of a blot in Rule
III. The first, "Possess your mind strongly with a [general]
subject," is deferred by Cozens to "The Descriptions of the
Kinds of Landscape Composition" (23 n), and we will also
consider it below. The second step is described as follows (23):
2. Take a camel's hair brush, as large as can be conve-
niently used, dip it in a mixture of drawing ink and water
... and with the swiftest hand make all possible variety of
shapes and strokes upon your paper, confining the disposi-
tion of the whole to the general subject in your mind.
Fig. 3 is an aquatint of one such blot that accompanied his
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Fri, 12 Sep 2014 11:12:20 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
1
-4,.
.,..
Atb
s
3 Cozens, A Blot,aquatint,
from New Method,London,
1785, pl. 37. New Haven,
Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Library,Yale
University (photo:
Beinecke Library)
methodological text. The printmaker made every attempt to
maintain the gestural origin of the marks and the thick liquid
quality of their medium.
The third step of Rule III suggests composing a large
number of blots from which to select "whenever you are
disposed to make a composition of landscape from any one of
them" (24). The unfinished sketch after the blot is defined as
"a landscape drawing without sky or keeping" (25 n). In
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British criticism, keeping
indicates the "subordination of lights" in a work (Cozens's
definition, 29), or the transitional values that define mass and
unify the lighting of a work. Cozens's example of a sketch
(Fig. 4, which is derived from the blot in Fig. 3) includes two
ground planes defined by light to dark gradations that are not
established in the blot. This aspect of keeping is permitted
when forming a sketch from a blot, as detailed in the third
step of Rule IV. Once the original blot is dry, a new sheet of
semitransparent paper is placed on it. Starting with a nearly
black drawing ink, the practitioner should "consider which
way the general light should come on the scene most
properly" (that is, from left to right, front to back, or vice
versa) and then should "make out and improve the light and
dark masses that appear in the first or fore ground of the
blot," which is visible through the semitransparent paper.
This step translates the original "accidental" forms of the blot
into the landscape components that they suggest: you should
" [study] every individual form with attention till you produce
some proper meaning, such as the blot suggests." The
foreground color, once dry, should be reinforced and deep-
ened in parts-" (especially the trees and shrubs, &c.) "-with
a second pass of the brush, and then the ink should be
thinned a little with water and the "second ground" made

4 Cozens, A print,
representinga sketchmadeout
with a brush,from the
precedingblot,aquatint,
from New Method,London,
1785, pl. 38. New Haven,
Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Library,Yale
University (photo:
Beinecke Library)
out, and so on for "the rest of the divisions or grounds in the
drawing" (26-27).
Up to this point the sketch is broadly defined in black and
white. Although the reinforcement of certain areas and the
articulationof ground planes allow some definition of middle
tones (keeping), the unfinished sketch appears mostly as a
series of stage flats.The drawing,or "finished sketch," is to be
made by adding the sky and the more subtle aspects of the
keeping, which serve to "destroyflatness" (30) and to unify
the atmosphere and lighting of all the ground planes. The
process of "finishing" startswith the thinnest mixture of ink
and water,with which the practitioner is to "wash the whole
landscape [all the ground planes], except those parts which
are intended to be in the first degree of light." Once dry, this
process is to be repeated as often as the ink will still mark the
paper, each time leaving more and more parts untouched;
and then a little more ink is to be added to the mixture and
the process repeated again. The overriding principle to this
Rule is that "whatevercolour or degree of shade is in use,
retain it as long as you can; that is, shade as much of the
drawingwith it as possible before you make the tint that is in
the cup darker" (28-30)-that is, work the whole of the
composition, not the individual parts. The "finished sketch"
(Fig. 5) defines its forms purely through chiaroscuro, the
description of the masses and shapes of objects through value
alone (although the aquatint differentiates the texture of the
rocks with thick lines and breaks the masses of foliage with
thinner lines).
10. As Lebensztejn notes (ibid., 46), Cozens has in fact borrowed this
definition from William Burgh's commentary to the 1783 edition of William
Mason's poem "The English Garden." Although not Cozens's own words,
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Fri, 12 Sep 2014 11:12:20 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
ALEXANDER COZENS'S NEW METHOD 115
C b; At-
f-
~ (
i~?- Vz?I
~~'4k
IIF
?MIAIII
Eighteenth-Century Classical Art Theory and Empirical
Epistemology
Even contextualizing the blot as a moment in an overall
process rather than isolating it as a final formal product, this
brief sketch of the technical aspects of Cozens's New Method
has raised several points that seem directly contrary to
received notions of academic classical process. Perhaps the
most evident include the "suggestiveness" of form that
mediates between the blot and the sketch (and "suggestion"
is, of course, a major trope of the Romantic aesthetic) and the
description of form through "masses" rather than the tradi-
tional classical terrain of "line." Nonetheless, Cozens's episte-
mological apparatus from the beginning is explicitly directed
toward a contemporaneous classical aesthetic (2):
Composing landscapes by invention, is not the art of
imitating individual nature; it is more; it is forming
artificial representations of landscape on the general
principles of nature, founded in unity of character, which
is true simplicity; concentring in each individual composi-
tion the beauties, which judicious imitation would select
from those which are dispersed in nature.10
Cozens's idea of "invention" is neither about the artist's
fantasy (the terrain of Romanticism) nor about "individual
nature" (the terrain of Realism), but about the "general
principles" of nature (the terrain of classicism). Unity, simplic-
ity, and the selection and concentrating of dispersed beauties
then, the genealogy of this passage suggests how widespread and precisely
formulated the contrast between "individual" and "general" nature was by
the 1780s.
116 ART BULLETIN MARCH 1997 VOLUME LXXIX NUMBER 1
"
,, /.',
, •,
o
...
:,.
• Or
. ,
"• •:.
, , ,,
, ..• • . ,, .. •
"X~e1~5:'s
through "judicious" imitation is the aim of Cozens's new
method. Compare Reynolds's ideas of the "Grand Manner,"
the highest style of art:
If it has been proved that the Painter, by attending to the
invariable and general ideas of Nature, produce [s] beauty,
he must, by regarding minute particularities, and acciden-
tal discriminations, deviate from the universal rule, and
pollute his canvass [sic] with deformity."
[The artist's] eye being enabled to distinguish the acciden-
tal deficiencies, excrescences, and deformities of things,
from their general figures, he makes out an abstract idea of
their forms more perfect than any one original. ...
Thus it is from a reiterated experience, and a close
comparison of the objects in nature, that an artist becomes
possessed of the idea of that central form, if I may so
express it, from which every deviation is deformity.'2
[P]erfect form is produced by leaving out particularities,
and retaining only general ideas. (4, 57)
Is Cozens's insistence on the "general" as opposed to the
"particular" in nature a mere concession to the rhetoric of
the time, designed to lend ethosto his method, or did Cozens
truly direct that method toward what we could understand as
a classical aesthetic? The answer to this question is best
explored through a consideration of the pedagogical and
epistemological underpinnings of British academic classi-
cism, and particularly through the widespread calls for
"generalization" in art and epistemology.
Cozens's pedagogical aims closely parallel those of Rey-
nolds's three "periods" of artistic study. Cozens directs his
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Fri, 12 Sep 2014 11:12:20 AM
. .. ,• ...
~ ?u..~
,,
5 Cozens, A print,
representingthesamesketch,
madeinto afinished drawing,
aquatint, from New Method,
London, 1785, pl. 39. New
Haven, Beinecke Rare
Book and Manuscript
Library,Yale University
(photo: Beinecke Library)
New Method against three specific causes to which "bad, or
indifferently good" artistic productions may be attributed
(2-3):
1. To the deficiency of a stock of ideas originally laid up in
the mind, from which might be selected such as suit any
particular occasion;
2. To an incapacity of distinguishing and connecting ideas
so treasured up;
3. To a want of facility, or quickness, in execution; so that
the composition, how perfect soever in conception, grows
faint and dies away before the hand of the artist can fix it
upon the paper, or canvas.
The three periods of artistic pedagogy outlined in Reynolds's
second Discourse (delivered in December 1769) are nearly
identical: 1) learning "the rudiments": "the power of draw-
ing, modelling, and using colours"; 2) amassing a "stock of
ideas" from "perfections which lie scattered among various
masters," which are later to be "combined and varied as
occasion may require"; and, finally, 3) (conditional) "emanci-
pation," in which the student learns "to discriminate perfec-
tions that are incompatible with each other" (2, 25-27).
Curiously, for both theorists, only one of the three aspects of
pedagogy seems to pertain specifically to art. The other two
are the domain of epistemology, or what the eighteenth
century called "human understanding": for both theorists,
the art product must be created by a mind possessed of a
"stock of ideas," which it is capable of properly "distinguish-
ing" and "combin[ing]" (or "distinguishing and connect-
ing" and "discriminat[ing]") and from which might be
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

"selected" (or "combined and varied") such ideas as "occa-
sion may require" (or "as suit any particular occasion").
Indeed, for eighteenth-century British empirical epistemol-
ogy in general, the ability of "distinguishing and connecting"
ideas from a "stock of ideas originally laid up in the mind"
defines the minimum parameters of rationality. John Locke,
in his highly influential Essay ConcerningHuman Understanding
(1690), had outlined three basic functions that the mind
could apply to perceived reality (particular nature). The role
of these functions was to "sort" perceptions into an ordered
"stock of general ideas," which constitutes knowledge. The
first thing the mind must do is "discern" a given idea or sense
impression from the welter of contextual ideas and/or
impressions.'" "Discerning" gives the mind a "simple idea,"
the fundamental unit of empirical epistemology. Once this
has been achieved, the mind can do only one of two things: it
can put ideas together through the additive faculty of "wit" or
separate them out through the subtractive faculty of "judg-
ment" (2, 11, 2, 156):
Wit l[ies] most in the assemblage of Ideas, and putting
those together with quickness and variety, wherein can be
found any resemblance or congruity, thereby to make up
pleasant Pictures, and agreeable Visions in the Fancy:
Judgment, on the contrary, lies quite on the other side, in
separating carefully, one from another, Ideas, wherein can
be found the least difference, thereby to avoid being
misled by Similitude, and by affinity to take one thing for
another.
There is a qualitative as well as functional difference between
the two faculties: although it makes "pleasant Pictures"
through its additive operation, wit "misleads"; it is judgment
that carries the burden of "carefully" establishing truth. This
qualitative difference between "wit" (associated with the
"fancy" or "imagination") and "judgment" is the foundation
of much eighteenth-century criticism and aesthetic theory.
Concomitant with the mistrustful attitude toward "wit" is the
denigration of metaphor (which explains one object through
reference to another with which it has some resemblance) as a
highly suspicious if also highly pleasing rhetorical device.14
The poetic devices of alliteration and punning (which oper-
ate on the formal similarities among words) are similarly
regarded with suspicion: Thomas Hobbes remarks that in
formal contexts, and outside familiar company, "there is no
11.Joshua Reynolds, Letter to the Idler, no. 82, Nov. 10, 1759, reprinted in
Reynolds, Dzscourses,London, 1992, 358 (app. B).
12. Reynolds, Discourse 3, 44-45. Further references to the Dzscourseswill be
cited in the body of the text with a figure indicating the particular discourse
followed by Wark's page numbers.
13. Locke, bk. 2, ch. 11, sec. 1, 155-63. Further references to Locke's Essay
will occur in the text, in the form (2, 11, 1, 155-63). Locke points out that
sense impressions are also epistemologically to be considered ideas, since
despite their presumed extramental origin we really know them only as they
appear to our minds.
14. For example, Oliver Goldsmith, in his essay "On the Use of Metaphors,"
notes that while metaphor can be used with "almost every verb, noun
substantive, or term of art ... with admirable effect," its extreme is hazardous:
"the danger is in sowing metaphors too thick, so as to distract the imagination
of the reader, and incur the imputation of deserting nature, in order to hunt
after conceits"; Works,I, NewYork/Chicago, 1837, 301-2.
15. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Indianapolis, 1994, bk. 1, chap. 8, 40.
16. Cf. ibid., bk. 1, chap. 8, 39- while "fancy" (Hobbes's technical term for
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Fri, 12 Sep 2014 11:12:20 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
ALEXANDER COZENS'S NEW METHOD 117
jingling of words that will not be accounted folly."'15 In
general, any discursive or aesthetic technique that operates
additively, on the "likeness" of objects or forms, is denigrated
(at least in epistemological, if not in aesthetic consider-
ations), while techniques that operate subtractively, carefully
establishing "difference," are lauded. Indeed, for Locke
(among others), the faculty of the additive "wit" is the cause
of both errors and madness, the opposites of rational under-
standing: "Mad Men ... having joined together Ideas very
wrongly... mistake them for truths."'16This creates a "disor-
derly jumbling" (2, 11, 13, 161) in the stock of ideas in the
mind, which, Locke elsewhere notes, "gives Sence [sic] to
Jargon, Demonstration to Absurdities, and Consistency to
Nonsense, and is the foundation of the greatest, I had almost
said, of all the Errors in the World" (2, 33, 18, 401).
As the philosophers' metaphors suggest (the "additive"
and "subtractive" functions of the mind, the "jumbling" of
ideas), the contemporaneous theory of the operation of the
mind was largely materialist. Ideas were said to arise through
the physical stimulus of perception and were "stored" in the
mind in fluid "sacs" of "animal spirits" or at the nodes of a
network of nervous fibers. In turn, these ideas were thought
to be connected through the stimulation of certain of these
sacs or nodes, causing the "animal spirits" to run from one
node to another, or causing a distribution of tensions in the
network of nervous fibers, making up "trains of thought."17
The eighteenth century formulated a distinct branch of
epistemology that explored the way in which "trains" of ideas
could be connected through the additive faculty of "wit,"
piloted by the subtractive "judgment," in a way more or less
conducive to rationality and to aesthetic process: the doctrine
of associationism. First formulated by Hobbes in his epistemo-
logical-political treatise Leviathan (1651), associationism took
on increasing importance to the critical and aesthetic thought
of the subsequent century, as WalterJackson Bate noted in his
seminal text From Classic to Romantic:
The psychological criticism of this period was either
determined or, more often, strongly colored by the doc-
trine of "the association of ideas"; it may be questioned,
indeed, whether any philosophical or psychological doc-
trine has since permeated critical thought in so great a
degree as did that of the association of ideas at this time.'8
Martin Kallich has most thoroughly traced the extensive
influence of associationism from its roots in empirical episte-
"wit") can please by adorning discourse, "without steadiness, and direction to
some end, a great fancy is one kind of madness. .. ." Cf. also Etienne Bonnot,
abb6 de Condillac, Essai sur l'origine des connoissances humaines (1746), bk. 1,
chap. 2, sec. 34, in Oeuvresphilosophiquesde Condillac, I, Paris, 1947, 18: the man
whose wit is too strong "will have too much memory and too much
imagination. ... He will barely have the ability to reflect; he will be a fool
[fou]."
17. Instances of this type of explanation include: ("animal spirits") Rene
Descartes's Les passions de l'me, Amsterdam/Paris, 1649; and ("pressing")
Hobbes's Leviathan, London, 1651. The most thorough subsumption of
aesthetic considerations to this materialist philosophy ("nervous fibers") is
that of Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquzry znto the Origin of Our Ideas of the
Sublime and Beautzful (London, 1757), rev. ed., London, 1759, althoughJoseph
Addison had already considered the operation of Cartesian "animal spirits" in
aesthetic phenomena in his essays "The Pleasures of the Imagination,"
Spectatornos. 411-21,June 21-July 3, 1712.
18. Walter Jackson Bate, From Classzc to Romantic: Premises of Taste zn
Eighteenth-CenturyEngland, New York/London, 1961, 96.
 118 ART BULLETIN MARCH 1997 VOLUME LXXIX NUMBER I
mology to its popular application by such critics as Isaac Watts,
George Turnbull, Henry Home (Lord Kames),James Beattie,
Alexander Gerard, Archibald Alison, and FrancisJeffrey.'9
It is to this context of "associationism" that Cozens's and
Reynolds's insistence on the proper "connections" of ideas
must be related. Since our main concern here is with aesthetic
practice, we will consolidate and explore the relevance of
associationism to both the production of art and to contempo-
raneous assessments of the mind's basically antirational ten-
dencies through that most famous of associationist texts,
Lawrence Sterne's Life and Opinions of TristramShandy (pub-
lished in installments between 1759 and 1767). The very first
chapter contains a covert reference to Locke's doctrine of
associationism and cites rampant associationism as the cre-
ative device behind the text:
... you have all, I dare say, heard of the animal spirits, and
how they are transfused from father to son &c. &c.-and a
great deal to that purpose:-Well, you may take my word,
that nine parts in ten of a man's sense or his nonsense, his
successes and miscarriages in this world depend upon their
motions and activity, and the different tracts and trains you
put them into, so that when they are once set a-going,
whether right or wrong, 'tis not a halfpenny matter,-away
they go cluttering like hey-go-mad; and by treading the
same steps over and over again, they presently make a road
of it, as plain and smooth as a garden-walk, which, when
they are once used to, the Devil himself sometimes shall
not be able to drive them off it.20
Anyone who has read TristramShandy will confirm that the
narrative trajectory is as "cluttering" and "hey-go-mad" as
"animal spirits ... set a-going." Tristram is not even born
until the fourth book of the serial publication, as he is
constantly distracted by the sidetracks and groundwork neces-
sary to explain his odd stance toward life and narrative. The
text is a precise index of the "disorderlyjumbling" (as Locke
put it) of Sterne/Shandy's random mental associations.
Significantly, Tristram's odd stance toward narrative is
specifically located to an exaggerated Lockean crisis of
associationism. The last phrase of the above citation is directly
derived from Locke's Essay ConcerningHuman Understanding
(2, 33, 6, 396):
Custom settles habits of Thinking in the Understanding
... which seems to be but Trains of Motion in the Animal
Spirits, which once set a going continue on in the same
steps they have been used to, which by often treading are
worn into a smooth path, and the Motion in it becomes
easy and as it were Natural.
There is a dangerous similarity between the "as it were
Natural" connections of ideas that are the result of mere
"custom" and Locke's just previous (but largely unexplored)
assertion that some ideas are "ally'd by Nature" (2, 33, 5,
19. See Martin Kallich, The Assoczatzon of Ideas and Critzcal Theory zn
England. A Hzstoryof a PsychologicalMethod in Englzsh Critzctsm,
Ezghteenth-Century
The Hague, 1970. See also Kallich's articles "The Associationist Crisis of
Frances Hutcheson and David Hume," Studzes zn Phzlology,XLIII,no. 4, 1946,
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Fri, 12 Sep 2014 11:12:20 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
395-96). Determining the difference between the two formed
a large part of the eighteenth-century epistemological project.
Tristram's "animal spirits"-and hence his text-have
been set a-going through a particularly disjunctive association
of ideas. His father had formed the habit of winding the clock
on the same night of the month that he made love to his wife.
As a result of her husband's odd association of these ideas in
the dubiously rational category of "family concernments,"
Tristram's "poor mother could never hear the said clock
wound up, but the thoughts of some other things unavoidably
popped into her head-& vice versa."21At the climax of Mr.
Shandy's lovemaking, then, Mrs. Shandy pops out with the
apparently unrelated question, "Pray, my dear ... have you
not forgot to wind up the clock?" Mr. Shandy is startled, and
as a result, the "animal spirits" that were to conduct Tris-
tram's preembryonic "HOMUNCULUS" to its place of recep-
tion were "scattered and dispersed." The homunculus ar-
rived at its destination "ruffled beyond description,-and ...
in this sad and disordered state of nerves, he had laid down a
prey to sudden starts, or a series of melancholy dreams and
fancies for nine long, long months together."'22 Again, the
joke is related to Locke's pedagogy, where dire results were
said to attend on the improper association of ideas, and it was
accordingly the responsibility of the parents "diligently to
watch, and carefully to prevent the undue Connexion of Ideas
in the Minds of young People" (2, 33, 18, 401). The startlingly
disjunctive association, inculcated at such an unfortunately
formative moment, resulted in Tristram's own permanent
state of distraction and hence in his digressive style.
Tristram Shandy, of course, is a fictional text, but the
complex stance toward and knowledge of associationism
required for appreciating it establishes at once the logical
extreme of and the general cultural knowledge of the
"associationist problem." The issue is one of "distraction"
and the fundamental tendency of the mind to make multiple
irrational leaps, especially when the (additive) "fancy" is
uncontrolled by the (subtractive) "judgment." It is in direct
relation to the associationist problem that we should under-
stand the need to generalize our ideas, which, as we have
seen, both Reynolds and Cozens emphasize.
This necessity is predicated first of all on the overabun-
dance and fundamental particularity of sense data and
"simple ideas." As Locke noted (2, 32, 6, 385-86),
The natural tendency of the Mind being toward Knowl-
edge; and finding that, if it should proceed by, and dwell
upon only particular Things, its Progress would be very
slow, and its Work endless: Therefore to shorten its way to
Knowledge, and to make each Perception the more com-
prehensive; the first Thing it does, as the Foundation of
the easier enlarging its Knowledge, either by Contempla-
tion of the things themselves, that it would know; or
conference with others about them, is to bind them into
Bundles, and rank them so into sorts, that what Knowledge
it gets of any of them, it may thereby with assurance extend
644-67; and "The Argument against the Association of Ideas in Eighteenth-
Century Aesthetics," Modern Language Quarterly, xv, 1954, 125-36. Mv one
major objection to Kallich's work is that he fails to allow for the incorporation
of "associationism" into "classical" aesthetics: he only grudgingly and in

to all of that sort; and so advance by larger steps in that,
which is its great Business, Knowledge. This, as I have
elsewhere shewed, is the Reason, why we collect Things
under comprehensive Ideas, with Names annexed to them
into Generaand Species;i.e. into kinds, and sorts.
The "particular" ideas of sensation are variously grouped and
ranked into more comprehensive ideas; it is only thus that an
inductive knowledge of horses-in-general can be achieved in
lieu of the particular habits and form of every specific horse.
By means of this "bundling," various levels of knowledge can
be reached. Fig. 6 shows a graphic representation of how the
mind can impose a structure of general categories on its
ideas, a structure corresponding to the general order of
nature that underlies the particular perceived instances. The
mind at its most basic level is a disorderly jumble of current
sense impressions and the random associative deflections
arising out of those sense impressions. The duty of the mind is
to re-form that chaotic network of ideas into a rational
pyramid of levels of knowledge, by first discerning distinct
ideas from the complex wholes of sense perceptions, then
regrouping similar ideas into bundles and ranks presided
over (as we shall see) by "general ideas" that represent the
distilled essence of the ideas falling under a given category.
The categories "species, genus, family," and so on, utilized in
the binomial taxonomy of the eighteenth-century Swedish
scientist Carl von Linnaeus, were used by Locke to rank other
sorts of ideas as well. Thus, the red of a particular piece of
cloth is a simple idea; it is part of the "species" red, which is
part of the "genus" color, which is part of the "family"
quality, and so on (see 3, 4, 16, 428).
In the pursuit of knowledge, the mind will refer to its
"general ideas" rather than to any given particular idea or to
an exhaustive survey of all similar particular ideas. Now the
question becomes: How does the mind form the "general
ideas" that are the ambassadors of a bundle of similar
"particular ideas"? The formation of general ideas of what-
ever referential level is predicated on the function of "abstrac-
tion." The following passage from Locke shows the relation
between "abstraction" and the "general ideas" that are
necessary to broaden empirical knowledge and gives us an
idea of how the function of abstraction operates on the data
of the senses (2, 11, 9, 159):
The use of Words then being to stand as outward Marks of
our internal Ideas, and those Ideas being taken from
particular things, if every particular Idea that we take in,
would have a distinct Name, Names must be endless. To
prevent this, the Mind makes the particular Ideas, received
from particular Objects, to become general; which is done
by considering them as they are in the Mind such Appear-
ances, separate from all other Existences, and the circum-
stances of real Existence, as Time, Place, or any other
concomitant Ideas. This is called ABSTRACTION,whereby
Ideas taken from particular Beings, become general Repre-
passing notes that "it must be admitted, the psychology only reinforced
neoclassic rules of cnticism and standards of taste" (Association of Ideas, 34).
20. Lawrence Sterne, The Life and Opznions of Trstram Shandy, New
York,1985bk 1, chap. 1, 35.,
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Fri, 12 Sep 2014 11:12:20 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
ALEXANDER COZENS'S NEW METHOD 119
sentatives of all of the same kind, and their Names general
Names, applicable to whatever exists conformable to such
abstract Ideas.
Even though its primary aim is (additively) to "bundle"
similar simple ideas under the aegis of a representative type,
the "abstractive" formation of the general idea is founded on
the process of subtraction-the subtraction of contextual
ideas and of accidental and contingent qualities from the
perceived object. We are not concerned here with the names
used to mark such general/abstract ideas-the name is
arbitrary (as Locke recognized), and thus there is no motiva-
tion obtaining between signifier (word) and signified (gen-
eral idea) in verbal language, and therefore there is no
motivation between the signifier (word) and the referent
(general nature). The case is otherwise for the visual arts,
where there can be conformity between the signifier (visual
re-presentation) and the signified (idea), inasmuch as the
signified is itself visual, and therefore between the signifier
(visual representation) and the referent (general nature, or
the ideal). Along these lines it is significant that Locke notes
that abstract ideas "are in the Mind such Appearances." The
name marks the appearance of the image-based abstract/
general idea; nor is this appearance vague and equivocal (2,
11, 9, 159):
Such precise, naked Appearances in the Mind, without
considering, how, whence, or with what others they came
there, the Understanding lays up (with Names commonly
annexed to them) as the Standards to rank real [i.e.,
particular] Existences into sorts [i.e., general ideas], as
they agree with these Patterns [i.e., the image-based
ideas]....
The "general idea," according to Locke, is formed by the
process of subtraction and is stored as an image in the mind.
(Indeed, the image-based model of the idea in eighteenth-
century epistemology is one of the most persistent and
characteristic tenets of the philosophy of the period.) It is on
this limited collection of "general ideas" and the relatively
fewer, and more controlled, associative deflections possible at
the higher levels of the referential pyramid that rational
epistemology and rational art are predicated.
Reynolds's Theory of "Generalization"
and the Problem of Associationism
Reynolds essentially took over this epistemology and applied
it to a cogent art theory founded on "generalization"-again,
specifically responsive to the dangers of "associationism"--in
which the only remaining problem is the "fixing" of the
general idea on the canvas, a process that for Reynolds was
largely mechanical. We have already noted that his three-stage
pedagogy is concerned more with issues of "human under-
standing" than with issues of technique. Reynolds explicitly
21. Ibid., bk. 1, chap. 4, 39.
22. Ibid., bk. 1, chap. 2, 36-37.
120 ART BULLETIN MARCH 1997 VOLUME LXXIX NUMBER 1
etc.
family etc.
general
nature
genus etc.
species species
bundleof'simpleideas' bundleof 'simpleideas' particular
S nature(s.i.=
.. s..
s.i. s.. sense-
s. s.. s.. s.i.
s..
impression)
s.i. s.i. s.i. s.i. s.i.
s.i. s.i. s.i.
s.i.
6 Diagram of the organization of "particular nature" into
"general nature" according to taxonomic "general ideas"
applies the Lockean concept of "abstraction" to his theory of
the generalization of form (3, 50):
[The Grand Manner painter] will permit the lower painter,
like the florist or collector of shells, to exhibit the minute
discriminations, which distinguish one object of the same
species from another; while he, like the philosopher, will
consider nature in the abstract,and represent in every one
of his figures the character of its species [emphasis added].
And for Reynolds, this function of abstraction/generalization
is explicitly mobilized against the problems of associationism.
The goal of art is to help the audience to control the mad,
disjunctive metonymic deflections of the stimulated stock of
ideas. His advice to the artist to learn from privileged past
artworks (6, 99-100) is aimed not simply at adding to the
"stock of ideas" but also at reducing that stock to a more
limited and controlled distillation:
A mind enriched by an assemblage of all the treasures of
ancient and modern art, will be more elevated and fruitful
in resources, in proportion to the number of ideas which
have been carefully collected and thoroughly digested....
The addition of other men's judgment is so far from
weakening our own, as is the opinion of many, that it will
fashion and consolidate those ideas of excellencewhich lay in
embryo,feeble, ill-shaped,and confused,but which are finished
and put in order by the authority and practice of those
whose works may be said to have been consecrated by
having stood the test of ages [emphasis added].
Art's object is thus to teach the audience (the general public
as well as the tyro artist) to "fashion and consolidate" the
particular, empirical contents of their minds. The artist is to
produce images of "general nature," which teach the audi-
ence the scope and application of "general ideas," as op-
posed to images of "particular nature," which merely contrib-
ute to and stimulate random associative deflections. This,
then, is why Reynolds constantly inveighs against the "particu-
lar" in art:
[The painter will not] waste a moment upon those smaller
objects which only serve to catch the sense, to divide the
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Fri, 12 Sep 2014 11:12:20 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
attention, and to counteract his great design of speaking to
the heart. (3, 50)
The attention should never be drawn aside by trifles. (4,
69)
The mind is apt to be distracted by a multiplicity of objects;
and that scale of perfection which I wish always to be
preserved, is in the greatest danger of being totally
disordered, and even inverted. (5, 77)
The detail of particulars, which does not assist the expres-
sion of the main characteristick, is worse than useless, it is
mischievous, as it dissipates the attention, and draws it
from the principal point. (11, 192)
Indeed, the concept of "General Ideas" is "the presiding
principle which regulates every part of Art" (4, 5). It is for this
reason that ideas of "general nature" are of crucial impor-
tance to Reynolds's theory, and to the eighteenth-century
desires for a rational epistemology and a rational art. Follow-
ing Reynolds and the eighteenth-century empirical philoso-
phers, I am contrasting "general nature" with the "particular
nature" that is formed by sense perception and is problemati-
cally inflected by the (usually) irrational metonymic deflec-
tions of the associationist mind. General nature is the truth;
and the art that exhibits it is valuable inasmuch as it helps to
consolidate and order the "disorderly jumble" of particular
nature in the public's mind.
Cozens's Epistemology:
The Blot and "The Art of Seeing Properly"
Above, I have suggested a way of understanding the classicism
of the late-eighteenth-century British Royal Academy that is
not transhistorical but highly specific to contemporaneous
epistemological concerns. The empirical concept of "general-
ization" preserves many of the traditional aims of classical
art-its supposedly cross-cultural and transhistorical ontologi-
cal status (as we subtract out the contingent data of time and
place), its postulate of improving the audience of art, and
even its insistence on formal simplicity-but at the same time
it is a highly temporally and culturally specific description of
how to meet those aims. With this redescription of the idea of
classicism in late-eighteenth-century Britain, we can better
understand the historical intent of Cozens's method of
blotting.
As in Reynolds's Discourses,issues of human understanding-
the ability of the mind to distinguish and select such ideas as
suit any particular occasion-are given a central place in
Cozens's pedagogy. After explaining what a blot is and how
the idea of blotting came to him (through a casual elabora-
tion of stains on a piece of paper, a practice later validated by
his reading of Leonardo's observations on wall stains), Coz-
ens returns to his three "problems" (12-13):
... to each of these defects, the art of blotting, here
explained, affords, in some degree, a remedy. For it
increases the original stock of picturesque ideas;
It soon enables the practitioner to distinguish those
which are capable of being connected, from those which
seem not naturally related; and

It necessarily gives a quickness and freedom of hand in
expressing the parts of a composition, beyond any other
method whatever.
Let us consider these three achievements separately. The first
relates the art of blotting to the "picturesque"-a connection
we shall consider below. The third relates to the formal
appearance of the blot, its gestural "swiftness" and "rude-
ness," which we are ultimately attempting to account for
within the context of the contemporary classical aesthetic of
"generalization." We shall here consider how that odd form is
conducive to the solution of Cozens's second problem, the
empirical/associationist issue of the due "connections" and
"relations" of ideas.
Cozens's first step to the formation of the blot, we will
recall, was, "Possess your mind strongly with a [general]
subject." The beginning artist, who may not be possessed of a
"general subject," is referred by Cozens to his "Descriptions
of the Kinds of Landscape Composition," a series of sixteen
aquatints appended to the end of the New Method.These types
represent the minimal degree of "design" that is to be
introduced in the making of the blot. Although Cozens does
not explicitly cite the problem, a more spontaneous blot
would probably center itself on the page, avoiding the
edges-not an easy beginning for a landscape composition.
So the sixteen "Descriptions of the Kinds of Landscape
Composition ... will be of use in furnishing the mind with an
idea of a subject" (24 n). Perhaps the most remarkable aspect
of these "kinds" is the generality that they represent, which is
highly referentially inclusive. Type nine, for example (Fig. 7),
is described as "Two hills, mountains, or rocks, near each
other" (32). The words chosen to define the forms on the
paper determine the significance of the details: if they are
mountains, the masses of light and dark represent huge areas
of outcropping or vegetation; if they are rocks, then those
masses represent small geological strata or faults. As Cozens
asserts, the general forms of these blots, operating together
with the intention to derive geomorphic objects from those
forms, have "a direct tendency to recal [sic] landscape ideas"
(16).
Although they are obviously "general," then, it is this
suggestivenessof the blot that has offered the greatest impedi-
ment to locating Cozens within his intellectual milieu. Since
"one artificial blot will suggest different ideas to different
persons" and, indeed, since "one and the same designer
likewise may make a different drawing from the same blot"
(11), then the blot can indeed be related to a Romantic
aesthetic of "suggestion." Or, if we posit a subconscious
motivation to the individual's interpretation of the blot, it is
related to the Rorschachian inkblot test. Although such
associations hold out a seductive theoretical interest for
current thinkers, their historical validity is dubious. Cozens's
idea of the utility of the blot is thoroughly empirical and
explicitly designed to "order" the parts into their proper
"classes," as in Lockean empirical epistemology (14-15):
[I]t may be remarked, that there is to be discerned, in all
whole compositions in nature, a gradation of parts, which
may be divided into several classes; for instance, the class of
the smaller parts, the class of those larger dimensions, and
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Fri, 12 Sep 2014 11:12:20 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
ALEXANDER COZENS'S NEW METHOD 121
so on to the largest. The curious spectator of landscape
insensibly acquires a habit of taking notice, or observing all
the parts of nature, which is strengthened by exercise. It
may be perceived, that the application of this notice in
youth is directed to the smaller parts ... from which it is
gradually transferred to the larger as we approach to age,
at which time we generally take notice of whole composi-
tions. By the means of this propensity we lay up a store of
ideas in the memory, from whence the imagination selects
those which are best adapted to the nature of her opera-
tions. All the particular parts of each object may not be
preserved in the memory, yet general ideas of the whole
may be thrown as it were into the repository, and there
retained.
What Cozens is describing is the formation of the rational
mind, which starts with particular ideas of "parts" (toward
which the mind of youth is naturally directed) and progres-
sively forms larger ideas of "wholes," for example, gradually
relating and subsuming the minutiae of leaves to the general
pattern of their forms and growth on a branch, and then the
pattern of branches to the general form of the tree, and so on,
until the idea of the (compositional) "whole" of a species of
landscape is reached that is adequate to but does not
enumerate its individual parts. Reynolds implies the same
gradual attainment of rationality through the formation of
the subtractive 'judgment." Whereas in the second period of
study, the amassing of a "stock of ideas," the student "must
still be afraid of trusting his own judgment," the third period
marks the conditional emancipation from authority: the
student may "confid[e] now in his own judgment" (2, 26).
This emancipation is conditional because the rules of art are
not to be dispensed with, they have simply been internalized;
the judgment has been trained; the rational ordering of ideas
has taken place; and the artist may be trusted to make valid
connections between general ideas.
However, where Reynolds's pedagogy is founded on the
"long, laborious" training of the judgment, after which the
proper art product follows almost as a matter of course,
Cozens's method offers more immediate gratification. Clearly,
anyone can make a blot, and, as Cozens notes, the elaboration
of the blot into the finished landscape does not require any
special capability. This is because such elaboration is an
additive exercise easily performed by the fundamentally
associationist mind; it does not require any of those difficult
"abstract" or "general ideas," but only particular ideas (16):
On the foregoing principles, very few can have reason to
suspect in themselves a want of capacity sufficient to apply
the use of blotting to the practice of drawing, nor can they
be totally ignorant of the parts of composition in nature,
for as they are previously prepared with ideas of parts, as
before proved, so [blotting] affords an opportunity of
calling them forth.... Previous ideas, however acquired
(ofwhich every person is possessed more or less) will assist
the imagination in the use of blotting [i.e., in elaborating a
composition from the blot]....
Blotting succeeds in artificially fixing the whole, the general,
to which the relatively unproblematic "stock of ideas of
122 ART BULLETIN MARCH 1997 VOLUME LXXIX NUMBER 1
particular nature" can be referred. Indeed, Cozens describes
the elaboration of the blot into the landscape drawing as the
successive "embellishment and consolidation" of the work
(13). "Embellishment" is doubtless performed when the
practitioner extrapolates landscape elements from the rude
forms of the blot (Rule IV); and "consolidation" when the
practitioner unifies the "keeping" of the work through
overall washes (Rule V). That the blot represents the crucial
"general whole" is confirmed in Cozens's description of the
formation of the blot (6-7), where "the attention of the
performer must be employed on the whole, or the general
form of the composition, and upon this only; whilst the
subordinate parts are left to the casual motion of the hand."
There is always the danger, of course, that "the person is
inclined to direct his thoughts to the object, or particular
parts, which constitute the scene or subject, as well as to the
general disposition of the whole." In itself, this "superabun-
dance of design" is not bad, but it means that the drawing
later to be made from the blot must be done "with judg-
ment"-that is, the performer has in this case destroyed the
very purpose of blotting, which is to serve the function of
judgment (or, rather, to elide its necessity).
Here we can confirm the basically classical tenor of Coz-
ens's epistemology of blotting. The proper blot will exhibit
only one idea, one "whole" at a time, and thus there is no
need to reduce its deflections through the subtractive judg-
ment (17).
A true blot is an assemblage of dark shapes or masses made
with ink ... and likewise of light ones produced by the
paper being left blank. All the shapes are rude and
unmeaning.... But at the same time there appears a
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Fri, 12 Sep 2014 11:12:20 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
7 Cozens, Twohills,
mountains,or rocks,neareach
otheraquatint, from New
Method,London, 1785, pl.
9. New Haven, Beinecke
Rare Book and Manuscript
Library,Yale University
(photo: Beinecke Library)
general disposition of these masses, producing one compre-
hensiveform [emphasis added]....
Cozens always insists on this singularity of the idea or the
subject suggested by the blot, as indeed he must, for if the
same constituent mark in a blot were in the same mind at
once a group of trees and a fissure in a rock, then his blots
would be ineffective, associationist, and would produce non-
sense landscapes. This limited "suggestive" interpretation of
the blots is thoroughly compatible with the eighteenth-
century counterassociationist classical aesthetic as I am con-
struing it, for the blot does not suggest different ideas to the
same mind at once (like punning, Hobbes's "jingling" of
words) and thus confuse that mind, or constituent parts of
different wholes at once (like metaphor), and thus distract
the mind, stimulating an ever expanding web of less and less
compatible associations. If it is justifiable to consider the
classical project of the time as a response to the dangers of
associationism to the discovery of the truth (a response best
seen in the "classing" of objects into their "general" referen-
tial types), then Cozens's blots are consistent with that project.
Indeed, although the method requires no special capacities
or training on the part of the practitioner, Cozens argues that
it is thoroughly consonant with the principles of artistic
genius (17-20). He even avers that the practice of blotting
helps to form the rational mind: the "art of blotting" is
"extremely conducive to the acquisition of a theory, which
will always conduct the artist in copying nature with taste and
propriety." He goes on to claim, "This theory is, in fact, the
art of seeing properly" (13). The very practice of blotting
trains the eye to subsume the details of observed nature to the
"whole" of the composition. Reynolds's art process is thus

reversed: instead of gradually learning to "distinguish the
accidental deficiencies, excrescences, and deformities of
things" through "long laborious" comparative observation of
particular parts (3, 44), the artist starts with the "general"
blot and learns to view particular nature as a blot and thus
reform its minute digressiveness. The practice of making
physical blots enables the eye to blot "when taking views from
nature" (13-14):
In short, whoever has been used to compose landscapes by
blotting, can also draw from nature with practice. But he
cannot arrive at a power of composing by invention, by the
means of drawing views from nature, without a much
greater degree of time and practice.
Blotting is asserted by Cozens as an immediate, if slightly
surreptitious, way to teach the mind to "generalize" empirical
objects (either the immediately perceived or the "stock of
ideas" in the memory).23
Classical Practice: The Blot as Technique of Generalization
The argument that I have presented above, which exposes the
practice of blotting as a solution to the same associationist
problem as that which Reynolds was addressing in his theory
of the Grand Manner, may account for Cozens's method in its
contemporaneous context-but the solution of blotting may
still seem surprising, eccentric, idiosyncratic to Cozens. This is
not so. Indeed, the contemporaneous meaning of to blotwas to
edit, with strong emphasis on the subtraction of excess. The
first definition for the word in Samuel Johnson's Dictionary
(1755) is metaphoric: "To obliterate; to make writing invis-
ible, by covering it with ink." Johnson illustrates the meaning
with a significant example from Alexander Pope, "Even
copious Dryden wanted, or forgot, / The last and greatest art,
the art to blot."24The OxfordEnglish Dictionary lists a specifi-
cally eighteenth-century usage of blot as "an obliteration by
way of correction." One of its examples (expanded here to
give context) is from Jonathan Swift's "Author's Apology" to
his 1704 Taleof the Tub:
He [Swift] was then a young gentleman much in the world,
and wrote to the taste of those who were like himself;
therefore, in order to allure them, he gave liberty to his
pen, which might not suit with maturer years, or graver
characters, and which he could have easily corrected with a
very few blots, had he been master of his papers, for a year
or two before their publication.25
We recognize several motifs in these citations: that the
younger are pleased by more associative, particular, unblotted
texts, whereas the more mature appreciate the value of a good
23. Nor is the art of blotting confined in utility to the genre of landscape.
Although Cozens does not elaborate on the thought, he notes (10), "I
conceive, that this method of blotting may be found to be a considerable
improvement to the arts of design in general; for the idea or conception of any
subject, in any branch of the art, may be first formed into a blot. Even the
historical, which is the noblest branch of painting, may be assisted by it;
because it is the speediest and surest means of fixing a rude whole of the most
transient and complicated image of any subject in the painter's mind."
24. The reference is to Pope's "First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace."
25.Jonathan Swift, The WorksofJonathan Swzft, x, London, 1883, 15; Swift
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Fri, 12 Sep 2014 11:12:20 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
ALEXANDER COZENS'S NEW METHOD 123
blotting; that blotting is a subtractive process applied to
copious, overly free expression; and, curiously, that although
Swift notes that the Tale required only "a very few blots," it
would require "a year or two" to execute those blots-that is,
blotting is a long, laborious task.
In his Life ofJohnson,John Boswell suggests the exact place
of blotting in the production of the art product. Discussing
literary imposture, Boswell refers to a Mr. Eccles's appropria-
tion of Henry Mackenzie's novel A Man of Feelingfor his own.
Eccles "had been at the pains" of providing fraudulent proof
of his authorship in the form of a falsified manuscript
transcribed from the finished text. As evidence of the mental
processes by which he supposedly authored the novel, Eccles's
manuscript included "blottings, interlineations, and correc-
tions, that it may be shown to several people as an original.''26
Reynolds makes precisely the same triadic assessment of the
functions of the mind as they are applied to particular
empirical data: the mind of the mature artist is "enabled to
distinguish the accidental deficiencies, excrescences, and
deformities of things, from their general figures ... [to] make
out an abstract idea of their forms more perfect than any one
original" (3, 44). "Interlineation" is a tool applicable to
"deficient" nature; "correction" to "deformed" nature; and
"blotting" to "excrescent" nature.
The idea that the blot was applicable to the problem of
overabundant "particular" nature and the excessive associa-
tive deflections of the mind was not, then, idiosyncratic to
Cozens but a current figure of speech at the time. In fact, we
can also account for the painterly form of the blot with
reference to contemporaneous art theory. Again, curiously, it
is Reynolds who can illuminate Cozens's technique of general-
ization through the formal attributes of the blot. I noted that
one of the aspects of the blot that we would have to account
for was its painterliness-the definition of form through
visible brushwork, in this case, a brushwork of chiaroscuro.
The painterly chiaroscuro of the blot contradicts our received
ideas of the "linearity" and "transparency" of classical art,
which should offer access to the realm of the ideal unprob-
lematized by issues of the artist's handiwork.27 It was Heinrich
Wolfflin who most thoroughly inculcated the view of classical
art as inevitably characterized by a "linear" and "multiplici-
tous" (as opposed to the Baroque "painterly" and "unified")
formal appearance.28 In the eleventh Discourse, however,
Reynolds follows a chain of reasoning connecting the smooth
(W6lfflin's "linear") surface to a "minute" reality of parts
(W6lfflin's "multiplicity"), which is a dangerous agent of
distraction, of associative deflection. Indeed, for Reynolds,
the "high finish" of the linear paradoxically implies more
manual labor-is less transparent to higher reality-than a
painterly generalization (11, 202):
referred to himself in the third person here.
26.John Boswell, The Lzfe of Johnson, Oxford, 1989, 300 (discussed in
reference to the year 1761).
27. I borrow the term "transparency," signifying the exclusion of all
evidence of handwork from the surface of the artwork, from Philippe Junod,
Transparence et opaczti: Essaz sur les fondements thioriques de l'art moderne,
Lausanne, 1976.
28. Heinrich W61fflin, KunstgeschichtlhcheGrundbegnffe, 1915; translated by
M. D. Hottinger in 1932 as Prznczplesof Art Hzstory. The Problemof theDevelopment
of Style zn LaterArt, New York, 1950.
124 ART BULLETIN MARCH 1997 VOLUME LXXIX NUMBER I
As [painting] is an art, [the ignorant] think they ought to
be pleased in proportion as they see that art ostentatiously
displayed; they will, from this supposition, prefer neatness,
high-finishing, and gaudy colouring, to the truth, simplic-
ity, and unity of nature.
Here is a place, then, where the epistemological necessity of
"simplification"-a constant trope of the classical aes-
thetic-is connected to a formal product rather contrary to
our received ideas of the classical. It is possible, in other
words, to speak of a painterly classical form; for Reynolds, the
expression of the "true, simple and unified whole" is best
performed through a "few, well-chosen strokes" (11, 193-
94):
... the pleasure we receive from imitation is not increased
merely in proportion as it approaches to minute and
detailed reality; we are pleased, on the contrary, by seeing
ends accomplished by seemingly inadequate means....
Carry this principle a step further. Suppose the effect of
imitation to be fully compassed by means still more
inadequate; let the power of a few, well-chosen strokes,
which supercede labour by judgment and direction [i.e.,
the direction of means to an end], produce a complete
impression of all that the mind demands in an object; we
are charmed with such an unexpected happiness of execu-
tion
....
It is of the utmost significance to remark that here the
visibility of the "few, well-chosen strokes" does not indicate
the manual labor of the painter, as is problematic in most
Renaissance and academic classical "antimechanic" theories
of art and of the "liberal" status of the artist in society.
Instead, these marks "supercede labour" (the labor evident
in "high-finishing") in favor of mental "judgment"-and we
will recall the subtractive function of the 'judgment" in
eighteenth-century epistemology. The application of paint
can in this case be seen as a "directed" index of the mind's
judgment, as performing an elision of detail, as gliding over
or through the minute particularities or "accidents" overly-
ing the "substantial" form of nature.
So a "few lines or touches" are not mere manual labor but
are the act whereby the artist performs-and the visible
guarantor of the artist's formation of-"one whole [out of]
what nature had made multifarious" (11, 201):
It is by this, and this alone, that the mechanical power is
ennobled, and raised much above its natural rank....
The great advantage of this idea of a whole is, that a
greater quantity of truth may be said to be contained and
expressed in a few lines or touches, than in the most
laborious finishing of the parts where this is not regarded.
29. Thomas Warton, Verseson Joshua Reynolds'sPainted Wzndowat New-College
Oxford (1782), Oxford, 1930, 1, 7-8. However, the brushwork that Warton
makes so much of was not, in fact, executed by Reynolds but by Thomas
Jervais. AlthoughJervais's name is also not mentioned in the poem, in a letter
thanking Warton for his tribute Reynolds insists that it is to his hand that this
work be attributed: "I am very sorry therefore my name was not hitchd in the
body of the Poem, if the title page should be lost it will appear to be addressd
to MrJervais"; ibid., iii.
30. William Hazlitt, "Essays on Reynolds's Dzscourses"(1814-15), reprinted
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Fri, 12 Sep 2014 11:12:20 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
The important thing for Reynolds is not what to represent but
what to leave out: "When [the artist] knows his subject, he will
know not only what to describe, but what to omit: and this skill
in leaving out, is, in all things, a great part of knowledge and
wisdom" (11, 199). "Judgment" and the "skill in leaving
out"-aspects of fundamental necessity to eighteenth-
century empirical epistemology in general, and to Reynolds's
theory in particular-are best performed by a few elisive/
comprehensive strokes.
Curiously-and this fact is underrepresented in the scholar-
ship-contemporaneous criticism makes much of Reynolds's
"painterliness." Thomas Warton's "Verses on Joshua Rey-
nolds's Painted Window at New-College Oxford" (1782) very
significantly singles out the handwork, the brushwork, as a
major agent of that work's ability to "reform" the viewer from
the "capricious maze" (compare with the "associationist
problem") of traditional Gothic stained glass to the "chaste
Design" of Reynolds's classicism. The first lines of the poem
already contain a reference to Reynolds's hand (although the
author is at first reluctant to quit his seductive Gothic taste):
Ah, stay thy treacherous hand, forbear to trace
Those faultless forms of elegance and grace!
Ah, cease to spreadthe bright transparent mass,
With Titian's pencil, o'er the speaking glass!
Nor steal, by strokesof art with truth combin'd,
The fond illusions of my wayward mind!
[emphasis added]
Toward the end of the poem Warton, his mind reformed,
again returns to the brushwork:
Behold, [Beauty] prints upon the crystal plain,
With her own energy, th' expressive stain!
The mighty Master spreadshis mimic toil
More wide...
While in the warm enamel Nature lives
[emphasis added].29
By the early nineteenth century, indeed, William Hazlitt was
able to trace a direct cause-and-effect relationship between
the ideas expressed in Reynolds's Discoursesand the fact that
"the English school of painting is universally reproached by
foreigners with the slovenly and unfinished state in which
they send their productions into the world...." He locates
the reason for this "slovenliness" in the suggestion that was
widely recognized as fundamental to Reynolds's theory: "[I]f
the rule here objected to,-that the artful imitation of the
parts injures the effect of the whole,-be at once admitted,
slovenliness would become another name for genius, and the
most unfinished performance would necessarily be the best."''3
In addition to the meaning of to blotas to edit, we have, I think,
in Reynolds, 320, 327, app. 2.
31. Malcolm Andrews's The Searchfor the Pzcturesque:Landscape Aesthetzcsand
Tourismin Brztazn,1760-1800, Stanford, Calif., 1989, is a recent example of this
assessment of the picturesque; he follows the assessment of Christopher
Hussey, The Pzcturesque:Studies zn a Poznt of Vzew,London, 1927.
32. The "Claude Glass" was usually a convex mirror through which the
tourist could frame a landscape and bring it within a smaller purview. It was
frequently tinted, both to reduce the details of the composition and to
simulate the mellow patina of old painting. See Andrews (as in n. 31), 68-69.

lost the rather painterly approach to the performance of the
ideal that Reynolds was seen as advocating, and which is better
able to account for Cozens's proposal of the act of blotting as
a technique of generalization.
Cozens and the Picturesque
Academic classicism is not the only contemporaneous context
into which Cozens's New Method fits both theoretically and
formally. In his second reference to the three achievements of
blotting, Cozens refers to the "picturesque." The tradition of
the picturesque is usually described in the scholarship as the
gradual emancipation of native landscape painting from the
confining rules of Neoclassical (for example, Claudean)
compositional techniques, especially when that emancipation
culminates in the celebration of the native English land-
scape.31 We can locate Cozens in this tradition without
disrupting the general academic classical logic that, as we
have seen above, was integral to Cozens's theory of the blot.
The Claudean landscape idiom represents the conventional,
or the "active," knowledge of the artist (which can more or
less distort even the empirical contemplation of the land-
scape, as the tourist device of the "Claude Glass" dramatically
demonstrates).32 The first achievement of blotting, we will
recall, is that "it increases the original stock of picturesque
ideas." The increase in the crucial empirical stock of ideas is
the result of the practitioner's efforts to extrapolate landscape
elements from the rude, unmeaning blot; confronted with
"unmeaning" form, the mind ransacks its store of ideas to
find a plausible meaning. The artist thus draws on his or her
passive knowledge as well as his or her active (conventional)
knowledge. By confronting the rude, unmeaning forms of the
blot, the artist is forced to account for compositional possibili-
ties and landscape "furniture" not part of the Claudean
idiom, and thus Cozens's new method expands the conven-
tional ideas of the "picturesque," or "that which is like a
picture."
In this way and in one other, Cozens's New Method can be
understood as expanding the conventional landscape idiom.
Typical of his systematizing tendencies, Cozens published a
treatise on The Various Species of Composition of Landscape in
Nature: 16 Subjectsin four Plates togetherwith some Observations
and Instructions (probably dating to the mid-1770s, as Kim
Sloan suggests).33 The plates of that essay have been recov-
ered, and Constable himself made copies of the sixteen
"species," but the accompanying text remains lost. The idea,
however, is almost certainly the same as that included in the
New Methodas "Descriptions of the various Kinds of Composi-
tion of Landscape." In the New Methodthere are again sixteen
"kinds," nearly identical to the surviving plate list of the
Various Species's "styles" of landscape.34 The kinds are de-
scribed in such terms as "2. The tops of hills or mountains,
33. Sloan, "A New Chronology: Part II" (as in n. 1), 356.
34. Sloan reproduces the plate list of The VariousSpeciesin facsimile in ibid.,
358, fig. 18; cf. the plate list to the New Method, 31-33.
35. William Gilpin, ThreeEssays: On PicturesqueBeauty, on Picturesque Travel;
and on SketchingLandscape.., London, 1792.
36. Ibid., 19.
37. Ibid., 4, 5, 36.
38. Uvedale Price, Essays on thePicturesque,as comparedwith the Sublimeand the
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Fri, 12 Sep 2014 11:12:20 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
ALEXANDER COZENS'S NEW METHOD 125
the horizon below the bottom of the view" (Fig. 8); and "11.
Objects, or groups of objects, placed alternately on both
hands, and gradually retiring from the eye. The horizon
above the bottom of the view" (Fig. 9). The numbers
correlate to sixteen plates showing exemplary blots of these
types. The typical Claudean composition can be described as
a balanced, gradual recession into space, formed by land-
scape elements projecting from the sides of the view, which
culminates in a (hazy, golden) distance (Fig. 10). This most
recognizable "picturesque" ("like a picture") composition-
allowing for Claude's expansion of the left-hand side to
incorporate the narrative-is probably that shown in Cozens's
eleventh "type." If we accept the scholarly view that British
landscape painting gradually liberated itself from this dog-
matic type (as it was practiced by Richard Wilson and his
students around midcentury), then Cozens's fifteen other
types are literally an expansion of the Claudean convention.
Type two, for example, with its high point of view and its
emphasis on rugged form, is perhaps recognizable as a
"sublime" landscape, although Cozens does not cite it as
such.
The formal products of Cozens's method, and especially
the idea that the landscape drawing is an elaboration on a
previous, highly generalized form, can also be accounted for
through reference to picturesque theory. In plates accompa-
nying the first of his ThreeEssays ("On Picturesque Beauty"),35
William Gilpin shows two landscapes, one simple, smooth,
and monotonous (Fig. 11), the other varied and roughened
with landscape "furniture" (Fig. 12). The figures illustrate
the following passage:
... in landscapepainting smooth objects would produce no
composition at all. In a mountain-scene what composition
could arise from the corner of a smooth knoll coming
forward on one side, intersected by a smooth knoll on the
other; with a smooth plain perhaps in the middle, and a
smooth mountain in the distance. The very idea is disgust-
ing. Picturesque composition consists in uniting in one
whole a variety of parts; and these parts can only be
obtained from rough objects. If the smooth mountains,
and plains were broken by different objects, the composi-
tion may be good, on a supposition the great lines of it
were so before.36
Gilpin thus draws the formal conclusion that the "pictur-
esque" is characterized by "roughness," differentiating it
from the "smooth" (which is associated with the "beauti-
ful")."7 This formal distinction presages Uvedale Price's more
unequivocal distinction between the "picturesque" and the
classical "beautiful" as the difference between "variety" and
"unity" (or, rather, between variety and the "insipidity" of
failed beauty)."3 But the process that Gilpin cites as mediating
Beautzful; and, on the use of Studyzng Pictures, for the Purpose of Improving Real
Landscape, 3 vols., London, 1810. On the interrelation of "beauty," the
"insipid" and the "picturesque," see I, 9-10, 72-74, 92, 103-5. For Price as for
Cozens and Gilpin, the picturesque can be described through a dialectical
process of, or as a medium between, generalization and variegation: "As the
excess of those qualities which chiefly constitute beauty produces insipidity, so
likewise the excess of those which constitute picturesqueness produces
deformity" (1, 175).
126 ART BULLETIN MARCH 1997 VOLUME LXXIX NUMBER 1
between the "smooth" and the "picturesque," like the
figures illustrating that difference, bears a remarkable similar-
ity to Cozens's method: the "picturesque" is an elaboration or
variegation of a basically monotonous form, just as Cozens's
landscape sketch is the "embellishment and consolidation"
of the blot. Although Gilpin cites the former figure as
"without composition," the aesthetic effect of the latter
figure is nonetheless predicated, he notes, on the general
composition shown in the "great lines" of the smooth
rendition, just as the plausibility of the blot is dependent on
its conformity to some valid "type" or "species" of landscape.
So for Cozens as for Gilpin, the foundation of the land-
scape drawing, the underlying condition of its success, is a
"general idea" of great simplicity, illustrating a highly referen-
tially inclusive "species" of landscape composition. For Coz-
ens as for Reynolds, this "simplicity" is strongly associated
with a broad, painterly manner, and we could draw Gilpin into
the group by describing this painterly manner as more or less
"monotonous." Picturesque variegation is best performed
only after and is predicated on the simple whole, to which all
parts must be subsumed-just as the large gestures of the blot
describe a whole, leaving what will become the "particular
parts" to the incidental markings of the brush.39
Conclusions: Cozens in Context
An odd conclusion begins to emerge here-a conclusion that
suggests that Cozens's blots are perhaps among the best
examples of the classical ideal of the eighteenth century.
39. Cozens's Principles of Beauty Relative to the Human Head, although
predicated on a linear rather than painterly generalization, uses the same
dynamic of first defining "Simple Beauty" (Fig. 1) and then proposing the
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Fri, 12 Sep 2014 11:12:20 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
1)
8 Cozens, Thetopsof hills or
mountains,thehorizonbelow
the bottomof theview,
aquatint, from New Method,
London, 1785, pl. 2. New
Haven, Beinecke Rare
Book and Manuscript
Library,Yale University
(photo: Beinecke Library)
Founded on the crucial epistemological concept of "general-
ization," the blot is coterminous with an idea of a "species"of
landscape, one of the more general of general ideas. At the
same time, it is not inappropriate to describe the blot as
"abstract,"as we have seen, as long as we apply a Lockean,
subtractive-mimeticmeaning to that word, as opposed to a
modernist, additive-formalmeaning. The picturesque theory
of the 1790s, like Cozens's New Method,incorporates this
highly generalized "abstract" form into its art process, as
though the dynamic, procedural revariegation of a basic
"monotonous" form guarantees to the picturesque "particu-
lar" its share in classicalideality.
If we return to the RoyalAcademy,we can in fact consoli-
date the odd connection between the monotonous and the
classicalideal that appears to have been the startingpoint for
Gilpin's and Price's interventions in picturesque theory.John
Opie (professor of painting at the academy, 1805-7) makes
reference to the associationist problem and the role of
reductive generalization in reforming that problem in a
lecture delivered in February1807:
[A]ll possible license may be granted [to the artist], and a
work elevated to any degree of the extraordinarywithout
incurring the censure of being extravagant,provided-but
here the mighty labour lies, which may well deter any
attempt much above the ordinary course of nature-
provided that the trains of ideas are perfectly connected,
and the whole perfectly consistent with itself; that there is
slight emendations to or variationson that "simplicity"that illustratesome
more specific "character"(Fig. 2).
 ALEXANDER COZENS'S NEW METHOD 127

9 Cozens, Objects,or
groupsof objects,placed
alternatelyon both
hands, and gradually
retiringfromtheeye,
aquatint, from New
Method,London,
1785, pl. 11. New
Haven, Beinecke
Rare Book and
Manuscript Library,
Yale University
(photo: Beinecke
Library)

10 Claude Lorrain,
TheJudgment of Paris,
1645/46, oil on
canvas. Washington,
D.C., National
Gallery of Art, Ailsa
Mellon Bruce Fund
(photo: ? Board of
Trustees, National
Gallery of Art)

This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Fri, 12 Sep 2014 11:12:20 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
128 ART BULLETIN MARCH 1997 VOLUME LXXIX NUMBER 1

11 William Gilpin, untitled "nonpicturesque" landscape, from ThreeEssays,London, 1792, pl. betw. pages 18 and 19. New Haven,
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library,Yale University (photo: Beinecke Library)

12 William Gilpin, untitled "picturesque" landscape, from ThreeEssays,London, 1792, pl. betw. pages 18 and 19. New Haven, Beinecke
Rare Book and Manuscript Library,Yale University (photo: Beinecke Library)

This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Fri, 12 Sep 2014 11:12:20 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

no break or opening between them, nothing of discordant
nature suffered to interpose, to check the progress of the
imagination, expose the illusion, and recall a different set
of principles to the mind: this is all that is meant by
probability in the imitative arts. ...
This reductive response to associationism, however, courts an
odd problem for Opie:
Instances have occurred of some [artists], who have even
been so absurd as to think colouring, chiaro scuro, and all
that contributes to illusion in painting, as beneath their
attention; who, because they have heard that nature might
be improved upon in some particulars, have fondly imag-
ined that their compositions approached the heroic and
poetical in proportion as they receded from nature and
became muddy, tame, and monotonous in the effect .... 40
William Hazlitt, we will recall, made the same objection to the
"painterly" theory of classical generalization, tracing a direct
connection between Reynolds's theory and the "slovenly and
unfinished" appearance of early-nineteenth-century English
painting.
In his Lectures on Painting, James Barry (professor of
painting at the academy, 1782-99) is less troubled by the
counterassociationist epistemological logic that associates
"beauty" with the "muddy, tame, and monotonous":
[T]he desideratum (at least in all matters of elevated
compositions) is, that the artist should possess a great and
noble mind, of ability to penetrate the depth, entire
compass, and capability of his subject; to discern in one
view all its possible circumstances, to select and unite
whatever is most essential, most interesting, and of the
greatest consequence to its energetic and happy elucida-
tion, and to be able at the same time judiciously and
severely to reject and suppress whatever useless exuber-
ances may have arisen from the heat and fertility of his
imagination.41
In another, though similar context, and with no sense of
drama, Barry concludes that "Mere Beauty then, (though
always interesting) is notwithstanding vague and indetermi-
nate ... ."42 Not only the anti-academic Hazlitt, but even the
academic theorists explicitly describe the classical ideal as
muddy, tame, monotonous, indeterminate, and vague.
Reynolds's eleventh Discourse on the "technique of gener-
alization" through a "few, well-chosen strokes" was delivered
in December 1782, the same year that Warton produced the
poetic ode to Reynolds's (mediated) handwork in the New
40. John Opie, Lectureson Pazntzng.. ., London, 1809, 78, 17.
41. James Barry, "Lecture on Composition," in The WorksofJames Barry ...,
I, London, 1794, 456.
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Fri, 12 Sep 2014 11:12:20 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
ALEXANDER COZENS'S NEW METHOD 129
College painted windows. The academic lectures of James
Barry that I have cited were delivered in the mid-1780s, and
Gilpin's "Essay on Picturesque Beauty" was published in
1792. By the early nineteenth century, both Opie and Hazlitt
feared that the idea of painterly generalization would be
carried too far and result in muddy, unfinished productions.
This sequence roughly sketches a history of painterly classical
"techniques of generalization," techniques which originate
as a response to the midcentury associationist crisis best
illustrated in Sterne's playful Tristram Shandy (1759-67).
These techniques, which climaxed in the 1780s, required the
dialectical corrective of picturesque "variegation" in the
1790s; by the early nineteenth century they were seen as
conventionalized and overapplied. It is doubtless significant
to this history that Cozens felt that a republication of his
method would be well received in the mid-1780s; indeed,
there are significant formal differences between the "black
Sketches and Outlines" of the 1759 Essay and the broader, less
determinate "blots" of the 1785 New Method.43 I have at-
tempted here to locate the epistemology underlying the New
Methodin the context of the late-eighteenth-century "associa-
tionist problem" through specific comparison with Joshua
Reynolds's epistemology and pedagogy, and to locate both
textual justifications for and figurative parallels with the odd
formal appearance of the blot from inside the academy and
from within the picturesque theory of the 1780s and 1790s. If
this exploration has (justifiably, I think) somewhat confused
our expectations of the formal appearance of the classical, I
hope it compensates by locating Cozens well within the
parameters of contemporary debate and artistic process.
Frequently Cited Sources
Cozens, Alexander, A New Method of Asszstzngthe Invention zn Drawzng Onginal
Composztzonsof Landscape (1785), in L'art de la tache:Introductzoni la Nouvelle
mithode d'AlexanderCozens,byJean-Claude Lebensztejn, Paris, 1990, 467-84.
Locke, John, An Essay ConcernzngHuman Understandzng (1690), ed. Peter H.
Nidditch, Oxford, 1990.
Reynolds, Joshua, Dzscourseson Art, ed. Robert R. Wark, New Haven/London,
1981.
CharlesA. Crameris a Ph.D. candidate at the Universityof Texas at
Austin, specializing in aesthetictheoryand issues of classicism and
modernism in art. He is currently completing his dissertation,
"FormalReduction and theEmpiricalIdeal, 1750-1914, "under the
advice of Prof. Richard Shiff [Departmentof Art and Art History,
Universityof Texasat Austin, Austin, Tex. 78712].
42. Barry, "Lecture on Design," in ibid., 398.
43. Cozens, An Essay... (1759), in facsimile in Sloan, "A New Chronology:
Part II" (as in n. 1), 354.