Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 12.djvu/430

 Coyte more pieces. At the time of his death he was the author of upwards of fifty-five dramas, burlesques, and farces, besides having written several plays in collaboration with H. C. Coape, Francis Talfourd, and H. Hamilton.

 COYTE, WILLIAM BEESTON, M.D. (1741?–1810), botanist, son of William Coyte, M.B., of Ipswich (1708–1775), by his wife, a daughter of the Rev. Edmund Beeston of Sproughton, graduated M.B. at Queens' College, Cambridge, in 1763. Like his father, he practised medicine at Ipswich, and interested himself in botany. His name appears in the lists of the Linnean Society from 1794 to his death. His garden at Ipswich was carefully tended, and a catalogue of its contents was published by him as ‘Hortus Botanicus Gippovicensis, or a systematical enumeration of the Plants cultivated in Dr. Coyte's Botanic Garden at Ipswich,’ Ipswich, 1796, 4to, followed by an ‘Index Plantarum,’ 1807. He contributed a paper to the ‘Medical Transactions’ (iii. 30) in 1785. He died at his residence 3 March 1810, in his sixty-ninth year. His younger brother, James (1749–1812), graduated B.A. at Caius College, Cambridge, in 1771, was rector of Cantley from 1779, and perpetual curate of St. Nicholas, Ipswich, from 1785 till 1812.

 COZENS, ALEXANDER (d. 1786), landscape-painter in water-colours, was a natural son of Peter the Great and an Englishwoman from Deptford. The czar took her to Russia, where Cozens was born (date unknown), and had another son by her, who became a general in the Russian army. Cozens was sent by his father to study painting in Italy, whence he came to England in 1746. In 1760 we find his name among the contributors to the first public exhibition in London of works by living artists, which was held in the great room of the Society of Arts. This was got up by a body of artists who afterwards divided into the 'Free Society' and the 'Incorporated Society of Artists.' Cozens contributed to the exhibitions of both societies. In 1761 he obtained a prize from the Society of Arts at the exhibition in the Strand of the former, but he was one of the original members of the latter, incorporated in 1766. He also exhibited eight works at the Royal Academy between 1772 and 1781. He was mostly employed in teaching, was drawingmaster at Eton school from 1763 to 1768, and gave lessons to the Prince of Wales. He also practised at Bath. He married a sister of Robert Edge Pine [q. v.], by whom he left one son, John Robert Cozens [q. v.] He died in Duke Street, Piccadilly, 23 April 1786.

Of Cozens's art before he came to England there are fifty-four specimens in the British Museum. These drawings, mostly if not all Italian scenes, were lost by him in Germany on his way from Rome to England, and were recovered in Florence thirty years afterwards (1776) by his son. They show him as a highly skilled draughtsman in the style of the time, with much sense of scenic elegance in composition. Some are wholly in pen and ink in the manner of line engravings. Others show extensive landscapes elaborately drawn in pencil, and partly finished in ink. Others are washed in monochrome, and some in colour of a timid kind. One, a view of Porto Longano in the Isle of Elba, is very prettily tinted. In most there is no sky to speak of, but in one he has attempted a bold effect of sunlight streaming through cloud, and brightly illuminating several distinct spots in the landscape. Several broad pencil drawings on greenish paper heightened with white are very effective. Altogether these show that Cozens before his arrival in England was a well-trained artist who observed nature for himself, and was not without poetical feeling. After his arrival in England he appears, from some drawings in the South Kensington Museum, to have adopted a much broader style, aiming at an imposing distribution of masses and large effects of light and shade. Sir George Beaumont was his pupil at Eton, and so also was Henry Angelo, whose 'Reminiscences ' give a lively description of his peculiar method of teaching: 'Cozens dashed out upon several pieces of paper a series of accidental smudges and blots in black, brown, and grey, which being floated on, he impressed again upon other paper, and by the exercise of his fertile imagination, and a certain degree of ingenious coaxing, converted into romantic rocks, woods, towers, steeples, cottages, rivers, fields, and waterfalls. Blue and grey blots formed the mountains, clouds, and skies.' An improvement on this plan was to splash the bottoms of earthenware plates with these blots, and to stamp impressions therefrom on sheets of damped paper. In 1785 he published a pamphlet on this manner of teaching called 'A new Method of assisting the Invention in Drawing original loose positions of 