City News

An exhibition of work by Birmingham-born artist David Cox (1783-1859) is set to wow American audiences when it goes on display in the US from 16 October 2008 until 4 January 2009 at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut.
 
Sun, Wind and Rain: The Art of David Cox, the first exhibition of this major landscape painter’s work for more than 25 years, will also go on show at Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery from 21 January until 3 May 2009. The Museum & Art Gallery, which holds the largest collection of Cox’s work in the world, will be the only UK venue for the exhibition.

Sun, Wind and Rain: The Art of David Cox is a major exhibition jointly organised by the Yale Center for British Art and Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. It brings together 125 watercolours, drawings and paintings from across the range of Cox’s career. The exhibition will include forty works from Birmingham’s own collections as well as loans from private and public collections in the UK and United States.

Cllr Ray Hassall, Cabinet Member for Leisure, Sport and Culture said:
“Birmingham has internationally renowned collections of art which regularly tour the world acting as great ambassadors for our city and promoting its great cultural heritage. This exhibition of work by the Birmingham-born artist David Cox is particularly significant, showing that the city has a great artistic history and adding to the city’s reputation as a cultural centre and place to visit.”

On show are some of Cox’s watercolours of his home town of Birmingham such as his study of the porch of St Philip’s church (now the cathedral), 1836, and his famous watercolour of the Birmingham horse fair (1840s). But it is from his most celebrated and typical landscape watercolour that the exhibition takes its name. Sun, Wind and Rain (1845), in which a couple make their way across a breezy, rainswept landscape, shows the gift for capturing passing effects of light and weather that made Cox famous in his own lifetime.

The exhibition includes many of Cox’s most celebrated works including his late oil Rhyl Sands (1854-55), a fresh and lively coastal scene; the dark and atmospheric The Night Train  (c.1849); and the delightful The Skylark (1849), showing a group of children watching a lark soaring above a rural landscape. Also included are some of Cox’s many paintings and watercolours of the Welsh village of Betws-y-Coed, which he visited every summer from 1844 to 1856.
 
The son of a Birmingham smith, Cox was one of the most famous artists of his generation, acquiring a national reputation for his landscapes and coastal views. He spent much of his career in London and Hereford but returned to live in his home town of Birmingham in 1841. He continued to work and exhibit until his death in 1859 at Greenfield House, his home in Harborne. The popularity of his work, his many years of teaching, and the success of his art manuals ensured that he left behind many pupils and imitators.

Although during his lifetime and in the years following his death Cox was seen as one of the leading landscape painters of the nineteenth century, in recent decades he has been eclipsed by his contemporaries Turner and Constable. This exhibition, the first major retrospective of David Cox since the bicentenary show at Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery and the Victoria & Albert Museum in 1983-4, will reassess Cox’s contribution to the development of British landscape art and restore him to his position as one of the great landscape painters of the Romantic era.

A full colour catalogue published by Yale University Press accompanies the exhibition. Written by Scott Wilcox, Senior Curator of Prints & Drawings at the Yale Center for British Art, with essays by Peter Bower, Charles Nugent, Victoria Osborne, Greg Smith, and Stephen Wildman, it is available from Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery shop.