Fantastic Figures Seated on a Mound c. 1800

John Sell Cotman made this watercolor, entitled 'Fantastic Figures Seated on a Mound,' in England sometime between 1800 and 1842. It’s a rather strange and dreamlike work, isn’t it? In it, we see two men in distinctive hats and vaguely historical garb. They sit on a kind of precipice with a stormy sky looming above. Cotman, as we know, was associated with the Norwich School of painters, who cultivated a uniquely English vision of the landscape. But here, he seems to be departing from that tradition, moving instead into a realm of fantasy. At the time, the institutions of British art—the Royal Academy and the Society of Painters in Water Colours— were becoming more established and powerful. Cotman’s decision to explore the imaginative, rather than to document the real, could be read as a challenge to these institutions. Ultimately, the meaning of this work remains elusive, in part because of the lack of documentation. It’s through close attention to social context and institutional history that we can come closer to understanding such an enigmatic image.