technically, this is scarcely the place to speak, but of the great band of early English landscape painters there is no one whose methods were more original or successful. He used few colours and a full brush, disregarding small details in order to obtain greater breadth and brilliancy of effect. In the purity of his tints, in the irradiation of his subject with light, in his rendering of atmosphere and atmospheric movement, in the fulness and richness of his colour, his best work is unexcelled. And his colours were the colours of nature; he belonged to what has been called the faithful school of landscape-painting, and he is at the head of it, with Girtin and Constable and De Wint.
There are a number of his drawings in the British Museum and the South Kensington Museum, but no oil picture of his belongs to the nation, and his greatest water-colour drawings are all in private hands.
There have been several exhibitions of Cox's pictures and drawings. One at the end of 1858 (before his death), in the rooms of the Conversazione Society at Hampstead; another in 1859 (170 works), at the German Gallery, New Bond Street; another at Manchester in 1870. The Burlington Fine Arts Club had a small collection in 1873 (lent by Mr. Henderson, and now in the British Museum), and the Liverpool Arts Club a large one (448 works, including five oil pictures) in 1875. He was also represented at the Manchester Exhibition of 1857, at the International Exhibition of 1862, and at Leeds in 1868, but his full power as a painter, especially as a painter in oil colours, has never been so well displayed, nor so fully recognised, as at the exhibition at Manchester this year (1887).
[For the events of his life the chief authorities are Hall's Biography and Solly's Memoir of David Cox. Solly's book, though it appeared some years before Hall's, was based on Hall's manuscript. Both books contain also much about his art, and notes by the artist as to his own practice. For his views on art, see his Treatise on Landscape and other works of his mentioned in the article. See also Palgrave's Handbook to the Fine Art Collections in the International Exhibition of 1862; Redgraves' Century of Painters; Bryan's Dictionary (Graves); Portfolio, iv. 89, vii. 9; Gent. Mag. new ser. xx. 230; Art Journal, ix. 123; Dublin Univ. Mag. liii. 747; Chesneau's English School of Painting; Our Living Artists (1859); Wedmore's Studies in English Art.]
COX, DAVID, the younger (1809–1885), water-colour painter, only child of David Cox, the famous water-colour painter [q. v.], and Mary Ragg, his wife, was born in the summer of 1809 in the cottage on Dulwich Common, where his parents had settled after their marriage. In 1812 he accompanied his father to Hastings, and in the following year, on the break-up of their home at Dulwich, spent some time with his grandfather, Joseph Cox, at Birmingham, and also with an aunt at Manchester. In the autumn of 1814 he rejoined his father in his new home at Hereford, and was partly educated at the grammar school in that town. He became his father's constant companion and his pupil, and was seldom parted from him, accompanying him on his excursions at home and abroad. In 1826 he resolved to become an artist himself, and in the following year removed with his parents from Hereford to London, in that year exhibiting for the first time at the Royal Academy. About 1840 he married, but still continued to be his father's helpmate, and the sharer in all his domestic anxieties or good fortune. In 1849 he was elected an associate of the Society of Painters in Water-colours. Through his devoted admiration for the works of his father's genius, and the careful study he continually made of his father's method, Cox managed, with the moderate ability that he possessed, to produce some very creditable paintings. As might have been expected, they seem but a reflection of his father's work, and show a marked deterioration after he lost his father's guidance. Among these were ‘Near Bala,’ ‘Moon Rising,’ and ‘View on the Menai’ (1872); ‘Loch Katrine’ and ‘Ben Lomond’ (1873); ‘Sunday Morning in Wales’ and ‘Rain on the Berwyn’ (1875); ‘The Path up the Valley’ (1877); ‘Penshurst Park’ (1878). Specimens of his work may be seen in the national collections at the South Kensington Museum and the Print Room, British Museum. Cox died at Streatham Hill on 4 Dec. 1885. He possessed a valuable collection of his father's works.
[Times, 14 Dec. 1885; Athenæum, 12 Dec. 1885; Solly's Memoir of David Cox; Clement and Hutton's Artists of the Nineteenth Century; private information.]
COX, EDWARD WILLIAM (1809–1879), serjeant-at-law, eldest son of William Charles Cox of Taunton, manufacturer, by Harriet, daughter of William Upcott of Exeter, was born at Taunton in 1809, and educated at the college school in that town. He was called to the bar at the Middle Temple on 5 May 1843 and joined the western circuit, but never obtained much practice as a barrister. As early as 1830 he wrote a poem for the ‘Amulet’ called ‘The Tenth Plague,’ and produced a volume of
