Today’s picture is Rhyl Sands by David Cox, painted in about 1855, in the artist’s favourite holiday resort on the Welsh coast. The first of four appropriately summery images for the month of August, it has also been chosen to mark the recent reopening of Manchester City Art Gallery, where it is to be found.
Rhyl Sands is one of the most surprising pictures of the nineteenth century. I still have a vivid memory of coming across it for the first time, on a trip to Manchester eight or nine years ago, in a room hung mostly with Victorian narrative paintings and nudes. Seeing it at a distance I suspected at first that its presence could only be explained by a mistake, or by some perverse curatorial antic. Why on earth had this fresh and breezy beach scene by Eugene Boudin – or could it perhaps be an early Monet – been put here of all places, among a bevy of pallid Pre-Raphaelite maidens? Then I got close enough to read the label and realised that this light-filled depiction of holiday-makers on a beach was, in fact, the creation of an English painter. He had created it, moreover, more than a decade before before Impressionism became even a gleam in Monet’s eye.
If most histories of English painting are to be believed, David Cox was an interesting but minor artist whose best work was done in the medium of watercolour. Ruskin passed a mixed judgement on his efforts in Modern Painters, criticising him for loose technique but praising him for “his melting water-colour skies … wild, weedy banks … the moisture of his herbage … the melting of fragments of white mist into the dropping blue above”. But Ruskin does not seem to have been aware of Cox’s remarkable...
