St. Mary's Abbey, York

St Mary's Abbey, Yorks is a fine pencil drawing of the ruins of this large abbey building surrounded by trees and other foliage. In the lower foreground is the figure of a woman spinning wool. Her presence gives some sense of the scale of the ruined abbey.

St Mary's was a Benedictine Abbey, the largest and richest in northern England. In its 14th and 15th century prime, it would have made an extraordinary ensemble with its near neighbour, York Minster, the two gothic buildings dominating the city. However, the Abbey fell into ruins following the dissolution of monasteries by Henry VIII, and by Cotman's time was a favourite subject for topographical painters: a more ambitious depiction is by Michael Angelo Rooker (1778). Its early Decorated Gothic architectural magnificence, dating from the last 30 years of the 13th century, would have been well known to antiquarians and artist of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a period which coincided with the early Gothic Revival.  The abbey's rural aspect would have been accurate then, and is still so today: it lies what are now the Yorkshire Museum Gardens. 

The drawing demonstrates John Cotman's great skills as a draughtsman and is from a formative period in his development as an artist. From 1803 to 1805 he spent time in Yorkshire on sketching trips. St Mary's Abbey, York highlights his use of the pencil at this time, particularly the sharp delineation of the architectural forms and the softer shading used for the foliage and the figure of woman.

The Norwich School
Born in Norwich, Cotman settled there again in 1806 and opened a school for drawing and design. He became a major figure in the Norwich Society of Artists founded by John Crome in 1803. Members of the Society derived their subject matter almost exclusively from the scenery of Norfolk and became known as the 'Norwich School'. They did much to promote the possiblities of watercolour and to establish it as a major medium of nineteenth-century landscape painting both in England and its colonies.

One of seven
St Mary's Abbey, York is one of seven works by Cotman included in the generous gift of some 360 British watercolours and drawings from the Archdeacon F. H. D. Smythe collection, which came to Te Papa in 1957.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Mary%27s_Abbey,_York

Tony Mackle and Dr Mark Stocker       May 2017