Cox’s reputation nowadays rests to a large extent on the drawings he made after 1840. _Hayfield with Figures_, _The Young Anglers_ (1847), the _Welsh Funeral_ (1850), _The Challenge_ (1853), and _Snowden from Capel Curig_ (1858) were among the fine things produced by the grand old artist during the last years of his life. Such moving and powerful works are stamped with the sincerity, simplicity, and rugged dignity of David Cox’s own character.
[Born at Plymouth, Sep. 17, 1783; settled in London, 1811; member of the Society of Painters in Water-Colours, 1819; published “Rudiments of Landscape,” etc., 1813, “A New Drawing Book for the Use of Beginners,” 1821, and other drawing books; published lithographs of his Continental drawings, The Rhine, 1824, Flanders and Germany, 1833, France, Switzerland, and Italy, about 1839; died at Denmark Hill, Feb. 1852.
EXHIBITED: Royal Academy, 1803-’05, ’08-’10, ’12-’14, ’17, ’26, ’27; British Institution, 1809-’11, ’16-’18; Associated Artists, 1811, ’12; Society of Painters in Water-Colours, 1815-’51.
WORKS IN PUBLIC GALLERIES: National Gallery; V. and A. Museum (Water-Colours); British Museum; National Galleries of Scotland and Ireland; Fitzwilliam and Ashmolean Museums; Manchester Whitworth Institute; Birmingham, Manchester, Bury Art Galleries, etc.
BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES: Ruskin, in “Art Journal,” 1849, “Modern Painters,” and “Notes on S. Prout and W. Hunt”; Roget’s “History of the Old Water-Colour Society,” 1891; “D. N. B.,” “Sketches by Samuel Prout” (THE STUDIO Winter Number, 1914-’15), with text by E. G. Halton.
REPRODUCTIONS: Ruskin’s “Notes,” etc., 1879-’80; “Sketches by Samuel Prout” (THE STUDIO Winter Number, 1914-’15).]
Up to 1819 Prout’s work was confined to the making of English topographical drawings and marine subjects. They show Girtin’s influence mainly, and they are stolid, heavy-handed, and rather dull.
In 1819 Prout went to France, and in 1821 to Belgium and the Rhine provinces. The drawings made from his sketches appeared in the exhibitions of the Society of Painters in Water-Colours and attracted a great deal of interest and admiration, partly on account of their novel subject-matter--for the public was beginning to weary of the numberless views of Tintern Abbey, Harlech, Conway and Carnarvon Castles, and other English subjects, with which it had been surfeited during the preceding twenty years--and partly on account of Prout’s boldness of manner and marked feeling for the picturesque. Having struck this successful vein of subject-matter Prout continued to work it till the end of his life, producing a great quantity of water-colours of Continental buildings, all executed on the same general principles, and several series of admirable lithographs from his sketches and drawings.