John Robert Cozens

John Robert Cozens (1752 – 14 December 1797) was an English painter of romantic watercolour landscapes, nearly all of Continental scenes. His career was brief and his production relatively low, but he had an enormous influence on later English watercolourists. Cozens painted striking watercolours which influenced Thomas Girtin and J. M. W. Turner, who together made copies of many of them when young, paid by Dr Monro, and has been described as "perhaps the most poetic of English painters". Despite using a "very limited palette, usually blues, greys, and greens, [and] the simplest of compositions ... there is a grandeur and simplicity about his best work which appeals directly to the heart". John Constable described Cozens as "all poetry", and "the greatest genius that ever touched landscape."

According to Andrew Wilton, Cozens was the "progenitor" of the revolution in [British] watercolour in the 1790s, having "in the 1770s systematised a method of applying watercolour pigment, without the admixture of bodycolour or any other substance, that for the first time comprehensively answered the requirement of landscape painting that it should represent vast expanses of land and sky". Martin Hardie says he was one of the first [British watercolourists] to use the medium consistently for its own sake as a purely expressional means", rather than a topographical record.

Most of his watercolours show scenes from two extended visits to the Alps and Italy, where he made numerous sketches, mostly just in line and a greyish wash. These were then worked up into fresh paintings back in London, often the same sketch being used a number of times, sometimes with different effects. At the age of 42 he had a complete mental collapse, from which he never recovered in the remaining three years of his life.

In June 2010 Cozens's Lake Albano (c.1777) sold at auction, at Sotheby's in London, for £2.4 million, a record for any 18th-century British watercolour. The "Statement of the Expert Adviser to the Secretary of State" in connection with the export of this noted that the previous record Cozens price was £240,000 for Cetara, Gulf of Salerno, Italy, sold at Christie's in November 2004 to the National Gallery of Art in Washington. In 2019 a temporary export ban was placed on the Lake Albano work, in the hope that the funds to match the price could be raised by a UK collection. More typical recent prices (after a general decline in watercolour prices) are below £100,000.