Samuel Cousins (9 May 1801 in

Exeter Exeter () is a city in Devon, South West England. It is situated on the River Exe, approximately northeast of Plymouth and southwest of Bristol. In Roman Britain, Exeter was established as the base of Legio II Augusta under the personal c ...

– 7 May 1887 in London) was a British

mezzotint Mezzotint is a monochrome printmaking process of the '' intaglio'' family. It was the first printing process that yielded half-tones without using line- or dot-based techniques like hatching, cross-hatching or stipple. Mezzotint achieves tona ...

er.

Life

Cousins was born at

. In 1855 he was elected a full member of the

Royal Academy The Royal Academy of Arts (RA) is an art institution based in Burlington House on Piccadilly in London. Founded in 1768, it has a unique position as an independent, privately funded institution led by eminent artists and architects. Its purp ...

, to which he later gave in trust £15,000 to provide annuities for superannuated artists. One of the most important figures in the history of British engraving, he died in London, unmarried, in 1887 and was buried in a family grave (no.12697) on the western side of

Highgate Cemetery Highgate Cemetery is a place of burial in north London, England. There are approximately 170,000 people buried in around 53,000 graves across the West and East Cemeteries. Highgate Cemetery is notable both for some of the people buried there as ...

Works

Cousins was preeminently the interpreter of Sir

Thomas Lawrence Sir Thomas Lawrence (13 April 1769 – 7 January 1830) was an English portrait painter and the fourth president of the Royal Academy. A child prodigy, he was born in Bristol and began drawing in Devizes, where his father was an innkeeper at t ...

, his contemporary. During his apprenticeship to

Samuel William Reynolds Samuel William Reynolds (4 July 1773 – 13 August 1835) was a mezzotint engraver, landscape painter and landscape gardener. Reynolds was a popular engraver in both Britain and France and there are over 400 examples of his work in the Nation ...

he engraved many of the best amongst the three hundred and sixty little mezzotints illustrating the works of Sir Joshua Reynolds which his master issued in his own name. In the finest of his numerous transcripts of Lawrence, such as ''Lady Acland and her Sons'', ''Pope Pius VII'' and ''Master Lambton'', the distinguishing characteristics of the engravers work, brilliancy and force of effect in a high key, corresponded exactly with similar qualities in the painter. After the introduction of steel for engraving purposes about the year 1823, Cousins and his contemporaries were compelled to work on it, because the soft copper previously used for mezzotint plates did not yield a sufficient number of fine impressions to enable the method to compete commercially against line engraving, from which much larger editions were obtainable. The painterly quality which distinguished the 18th-century mezzotints on copper was wanting in his later works, because the hardness of the steel on which they were engraved impaired freedom of execution and richness of tone, and so enhanced the labor of scraping that he accelerated the work by stipple, etching the details instead of scraping them out of the ground in the manner of his predecessors. To this mixed style, previously used by

Richard Earlom Richard Earlom (baptised 14 May 17439 October 1822) was an England, English mezzotinter. Biography Earlom was born and died in London. His natural faculty for art appears to have been first called into exercise by his admiration for the lord ma ...

on copper, Cousins added heavy roulette and rocking-tool textures, tending to fortify the darks, when he found that the burr even on steel failed to yield enough fine impressions to meet high demand. The effect of his prints in this method after Reynolds and Millais was mechanical and out of harmony with the picturesque technique of these painters, but the phenomenal popularity which Cousins gained for his works at least kept alive and in favor a form of mezzotint engraving during a critical phase of its history. Abraham Raimbach, the line engraver, dated the decline of his own art in England from the appearance in 1837 of Cousins's print (in the mixed style) after Landseer's ''

Bolton Abbey Bolton Abbey in Wharfedale, North Yorkshire, England, takes its name from the ruins of the 12th-century Augustinian monastery now known as Bolton Priory. The priory, closed in the 1539 Dissolution of the Monasteries ordered by King H ...

''. Such plates as ''Miss Peel'', after Lawrence (published in 1833);'' A Midsummer Nights Dream'', after Landseer (1857); ''The Order of Release'' and ''The First Minuet'', after Millais (1856 and 1868); ''The Strawberry Girl'' and ''Lavinia, Countess Spencer'', after Reynolds; and ''Miss Rich'', after Hogarth (1873-1877), represent various stages of Cousins's mixed method. It reached its final development in the plates after Millais's ''Cherry Ripe'' and ''Pomona'', published in 1881 and 1882, when the invention of facing copper-plates with a film of steel to make them yield larger editions led to the revival of pure mezzotint on copper, which rendered obsolete the steel plate and the mixed style which it fostered. The fine draughtsmanship of Cousins was as apparent in his prints as in his original lead-pencil portraits exhibited in London in 1882.

Gallery

File:Samuel Cousins by J. P. Mayall.jpg,
Samuel Cousins
' by J. P. Mayall from Artists at Home, photogravure, published 1884

National Gallery of Art Library, Washington, DC Samuel Taylor Coleridge at age 42.jpg,

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Samuel Taylor Coleridge (; 21 October 177225 July 1834) was an English poet, literary critic, philosopher, and theologian who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lak ...

at age 42, engraving by Samuel Cousins from a portrait by

Washington Allston Washington Allston (November 5, 1779 – July 9, 1843) was an American painter and poet, born in Waccamaw Parish, South Carolina. Allston pioneered America's Romantic movement of landscape painting. He was well known during his lifetime for ...

. Digitally restored. File:Sant-cousins.jpg, ''Speak Lord For Thy Servant Hears'' (after James Sant), 1854 File:Family grave of Samuel Cousins in Highgate Cemetery.jpg, Family grave of Samuel Cousins in

References

*George Pycroft, M.R.C.S.E., ''Memoir of Samuel Cousins'', R.A., Member of the Legion of Honor (published for private circulation by E. E. Leggatt, London, 1899); *

Algernon Graves Algernon Graves (London 1845–1922 London) was a British art historian and art dealer, who specialised in the documentation of the exhibition and sale of works of art. He created reference sources that began the modern discipline of provenance r ...

, ''Catalogue of the Works of Samuel Cousins, RA.'' (published by H. Graves and Co., London, 1888); *

Alfred Whitman Alfred Whitman (1797 – January 27, 1861) was a farmer, merchant and political figure in Nova Scotia. He represented the township of Annapolis in the Nova Scotia House of Assembly from 1844 to 1857. He was born in Rosette (later Round Hill, N ...

, ''Samuel Cousins'' (published by George Bell & Sons, London, 1904), which contains a catalogue and illustrations.

External links

Prints & People: A Social History of Printed Pictures
an exhibition catalog from The Metropolitan Museum of Art (fully available online as PDF), which contains material on Samuel Cousins (see index) *Alfred Whitman (1904)
''Samuel Cousins''
Illustrated, from

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music ...

Profile on Royal Academy of Arts Collections
;Attribution {{DEFAULTSORT:Cousins, Samuel 1801 births 1887 deaths Burials at Highgate Cemetery English engravers Royal Academicians