Antwerp, Morning

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Artist: David Cox (British, 1783–1859)
Medium: Watercolor and graphite on medium, slightly textured, cream wove paper
Size: Sheet: 7 1/8 x 9 7/8 inches (18.1 x 25.1 cm)
Museum: Yale Center for British Art
Rights: CC0 — no rights reserved

It was largely from the example of his younger contemporary Richard Parkes Bonington that Cox in the late 1820s and early 1830s adopted both a more fluid and more delicate touch in his finished watercolors and a lighter and brighter color range. In many of his most Boningtonesque productions, however, Cox gravitates toward a golden sunlit atmosphere more reminiscent of J. M. W. Turner than of Bonington’s typically cool and silvery harmonies.

Antwerp, Morning displays a Turnerian glowing sky but is otherwise close to Bonington in character and treatment. Exhibited at the Society of Painters in Water Colours in 1832 and sold for four guineas, the watercolor was reproduced in color in the 1845 edition of Ackermann’s Art of Painting in Watercolours.

Text: Yale Center for British Art.