The Collections supported by Leeds Art Fund

Leeds Art Fund has contributed to 430 acquisitions and owns outright a collection of some 200 works some of which have been given by our members. It is a diverse and dynamic assortment of artworks including paintings, sculpture, and works of applied art including silver, furniture and ceramics. You can explore a selection of some of the items we have helped to purchase on this page.

Silver Chinoiserie Epergne
Silver Chinoiserie Epergne
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Artists

West Door, St. Nicholas, King’s Lynn

Cotman, John Sell

c. 1811, Sketch, pencil and grey wash on wove paper

The Leeds Art Gallery has over six hundred watercolours and drawings by Cotman, one of the finest watercolour painters of the nineteenth century. The Leeds Art Gallery also has in its collection one of the few oil paintings made by Cotman; see under ‘On the Yare’. Born in Norwich, John Sell Cotman was, like J.M.W. Turner, the son of a hairdresser. He attended Norwich Grammar School and probably worked in his father’s hairdressing shop until in 1798, aged sixteen, he moved to London where he worked for a publisher in the Strand. A year later, Cotman had joined Turner and Girtin as a member of the circle of Dr.Thomas Monro, Principal Physician at the Bethlem Hospital and an amateur artist, who encouraged the young artists to copy and colour the work of earlier landscape artists, such as Thomas Hearne. Like Girtin and Turner, Cotman realised there was growing demand for landscape pictures and he undertook sketching tours to the North of England. The first of his three tours in Yorkshire was made in 1803, when he was invited to stay with the Cholmeley family in Brandsby, North Yorkshire in order to give drawing lessons to the family. His third visit was followed by a visit to Rokeby Park and Greta Bridge, where he made studies of the River Greta and the bridge. In 1806, Cotman moved back to Norwich, where he set up a drawing school and exhibited his works, becoming first Vice-President of the Norwich Society of Artists in 1810 and President in 1811. Cotman’s sketch of the West Door, St. Nicholas, King’s Lynn, in pencil and grey wash on wove paper, was made c. 1811 and was intended for Cotman’s Architectural Antiquities of Norfolk, published in 1817. The drawing was bought by the LACF in 1926.

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On the River Yare

On the River Yare

Cotman, John Sell

c. 1809, Oil on canvas, 15.4 x 30.5

An oil painting, one of very few painted by Cotman in that medium. See also Cotman’s sketch of the West Door, St. Nicholas, King’s Lynn. On the River Yare. In 1812, Cotman moved to Yarmouth, under the patronage of Dawson Turner, a local banker. Bought by the LACF in 1934, On the River Yare is one of the few oil paintings made by Cotman. He had married in 1809 and, in order to support his family, he began a commercial venture, producing a ‘Circulating Library’ of six hundred drawings for subscribers to copy. Following three tours in Normandy, in 1818 and 1820, commissioned by his patron Dawson Turner, Cotman returned to Norwich in 1823, where he remained until he was appointed Professor of Drawing at King’s College School. In 1837, Cotman’s class was joined by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his brother William, who later remembered Cotman as ‘an alert, forceful-looking man, of modest stature, with a fine well-moulded face, which testified to an impulsive nature, somewhat worn and worried’.

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