Although Cox seems to have made little use of his sketches of Amiens, Beauvais, Rouen, and Paris in the production of finished watercolors, he did exhibit a number of Parisian subjects in the two subsequent Society of Painters in Water Colours exhibitions. In 1830 he exhibited two watercolors based on his experience in Paris the year before, and the following year he sent five views of Paris to the exhibition.
After that, with the one notable exception of “The Louvre and Tuilleries, from Pont Neuf” shown in 1838, Paris disappears from Cox’s exhibited work.“Pont Neuf from the Quai de l’Ecole, Paris,” exhibited in 1831, was probably an as-yet-untraced finished version of this drawing. It is highly unlikely that Cox would have considered such a sketch suitable for exhibition, although he did at times show drawings labeled as sketches. Certainly Pont Neuf is more fully realized than many of his Continental sketches.
Although not conventionally finished, it displays a richer array of brushwork: color worked into wet color; sharp, crisp accents; a dry brush dragged across the paper; and puddled color from a heavily loaded brush. Even if Cox did take the radical step of exhibiting the present Pont Neuf in 1831, the fact remains that the body of Parisian sketches, which have come to be among the most highly regarded of Cox’s watercolors, were in his own lifetime known to only a small coterie of family and friends.
Text: Yale Center for British Art.
