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Overview
About 1798 Cotman went to study in London, where he met the painters J.M.W. Turner and Thomas Girtin. From 1800 to 1806 he exhibited watercolours at the Royal Academy, and some of his works of this period are considered among the finest English landscape paintings of the time. Greta Bridge (c. 1805), probably his best-known work, is typical of the work he produced while he lived at Greta in Yorkshire. It is composed almost entirely of broad planes of colour, avoiding chiaroscuro and linear design. Late in 1806 Cotman left London and returned to Norwich, where he worked as a drawing master and exhibited regularly with the Norwich Society of Artists. In 1812 he moved to Yarmouth and began a long period of work as an archaeological draftsman, evident in this etching. He returned to Norwich in 1823 and to London in 1834. In his last years his style changed completely, and he mixed rice paste with his watercolours to get a rich impasto effect.
Most of his etchings, as here, were soft-ground etchings that simulate chalk and pencil drawings. The technique allows the artist to drawn freely onto a surface applied to the printing plate which is then peeled away to expose the bare areas metal for etching. From the freshness of the images which Cotman produced using this method, it is clear that the freedom which this technique allowed was perfectly suited to his rapid style of draughtsmanship.
Cotman's soft-ground etchings are some of the most personal and evocative examples of his printed works. They are thought to date from a wide period between the years 1808 and the late 1820s. Impressions of some subjects have been traced to the years 1815 and 1824, but beyond this they cannot be dated with any certainty. The plates were never published by Cotman himself; this impression was issued as part of the 48-plate Liber Studiorum; a series of Sketches and Studies by John Sell Cotman, Esq., by H.G. Bohn in 1838.
This curator noticed one immediate complication about the print. The building depicted is not the picturesque Gothic ruins of Whitby Abbey, nor do we see the romantic small town near where the abbey is located; Whitby is a port, while this landscape looks like an inland one. The mountains are also more dramatic than the admittedly hilly countryside of North Yorkshire. In fact, the massive structure bears a strong resemblance to Cotman's Chateau in Normandy (1835; British Museum, London). Art historians have traced the building back to what was a humble farmhouse in Wales when Cotman depicted it in 1800, but which has grown in his imagination to something that approaches a classical palace. The British Museum is certainly right in claiming 'Whether there was ever any strong likeness to any building in or near Whitby seems doubtful.' How and why the title of Chateau in Normandy became attached to the work also remains mysterious, but this may have been the intention; it is certainly more evocative than the association with Whitby, and the link with France may have appeared one way of acknowledging Cotman's debt to the landscapes of Poussin and Dughet.
See:
British Museum, http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=745582&partId=1&searchText=cotman +whitby&page=1
Campbell Fine Art, http://www.campbell-fine-art.com/artists.php?id=161
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Encyclopedia Britannica, 'John Sell Cotman British Painter', https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Sell-Cotman
Dr Mark Stocker Curator, Historical International Art April 2018