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When Cox and his son arrived in Paris, they were greeted by the Birmingham engraver John Pye, then resident in the city, who offered to act as their guide. On their second day in the city, as Pye was showing them the Palais Royal, Cox sprained his ankle. For the six weeks that he remained in Paris, he pursued his sketching from a hired cab.1 These four drawings of the city represent a working process similar to that of the drawings of Amiens and Rouen. The deft and vigorous pencil line is still very much in evidence, and the annotations in Near the Pont d'Arcole and Pont Neuf from the Quai de l'Ecole suggest that they were originally produced as pencil drawings, with the watercolor added at a later stage. The use of washes of color to establish patterns of light and shadow, however, would seem to indicate that Cox was using watercolor to record his observations on the spot, and the limited number of colors that he employed might also suggest working in the open air. Perhaps, in at least some of these drawings, an initial sketching session in pencil would have been followed by a return visit to the site to work up the sketch in watercolor. In these drawings, particularly in Near the Pont d'Arcole and Pont Neuf from the Quai de l'Ecole, the watercolor character begins to eclipse the pencil drawing. The color is darker and more intense, with more weight given to contrasts of light and shade. The compositions are also more fully fleshed out, without the sense of selective focus evident in the Amiens and Rouen drawings.
Although Cox seems to have made little use of his sketches of Amiens, Beauvais, Rouen, and Paris in the production of finished watercolors, he did exhibit a number of Parisian subjects in the two subsequent SPWC exhibitions. In the exhibition of 1830, Cox exhibited two watercolors based on his experience in Paris the year before. These were "In the Garden of the Tuilleries" (178), and "Part of the Tuilleries, at Paris" (205), which may be the watercolor in the Leeds City Art Gallery, Pavillon de Flore, Tuileries, Paris (fig. 98). The following year Cox sent five views of Paris to the SPWC: "Pont Neuf from the Quai de l'Ecole, Paris" (85); "Pont Louis Seize, Paris" (115); "Rue Vivienne, Paris" (246); "Door of the Church of St. Roch, Paris" (290); and "Chamber of Deputies, Paris" (364).2 After that, with the one notable exception of "The Louvre and Tuilleries, from Pont Neuf" (78) at the SPWC in 1838, Paris disappears from Cox's exhibited work.
The exhibited "Rue Vivienne, Paris" was probably the watercolor formerly in the collection of Gérald Bauer. "Pont Neuf from the Quai de l'Ecole, Paris" was probably an as-yet-untraced finished version of the drawing of that view in the present exhibition. It is highly unlikely that Cox would have considered such a sketch suitable for exhibition, although he did at times show drawings labeled as sketches. Certainly Pont Neuf is more fully realized than many of his Continental sketches, in which the color is washed in simply and freely to indicate the fall of shadows or to record the colors of roofs and walls and shutters. Pont Neuf, though not conventionally finished, displays a richer array of brushwork: color worked into wet color; sharp, crisp accents; a dry brush dragged across the paper; and puddled color from a heavily loaded brush. Even if Cox did take the radical step of exhibiting the present Pont Neuf in 1831, the fact remains that the body of Parisian sketches, which have come to be among the most highly regarded of Cox's watercolors, were in his own lifetime known to only a small coterie of family and friends.

[1] Solly, 1873, p. 64.
[2] In this listing of watercolors exhibited by Cox at the SPWC, Solly (1873, p. 321) omits three of the five.

Scott Wilcox

Scott Wilcox, Sun, wind, and rain : the art of David Cox, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2008, pg. 174, cat. no. 46, NJ18 .C829 W542 + Oversize (YCBA)