Design and Art Australia Online

bird painter, amateur photographer and ornithologist, third son of William Cotton and Catherine, née Savery, was born at Balham Hill, Clapham Common, near London. He went to school in Richmond, then was for a time articled to a solicitor, although inclined to art, literature and natural history. Cotton’s notebooks containing his wash and ink copies of well-known paintings, his Journal of a Tour to Milan by way of Paris, Lyons etc. 1824 and his Journal of a Tour down the Rhine etc. 1830 , survive. By 1835-36 he had published The Resident Song Birds of Great Britain containing Delineations of Seventeen Birds and The Song Birds of Great Britain containing the Delineations of Thirty-three Birds . These rare and bibliographically complex works were followed by another book, Beautiful Birds , published after his death.

In 1843 John Cotton, his wife Susannah, née Edwards, and their nine children followed his younger brother, Edward, to Australia and leased Doogallook, a run of about 30 000 acres on the Goulburn River between the King Parrot and Muddy creeks. From the time of his arrival Cotton showed intense interest in local bird life; by 1843 he was making sketches of birds. In 1848 John informed William, his eldest brother still in England, that he had 'upwards of a hundred drawings of birds found in this district’ and was seeking encouragement and help to publish Ornithological Sketches by a Resident of Port Phillip, NSW . He also sent home many bird specimens (skins) to sell. Various factors mitigated against the success of these projects; zoological specimens were already being sent to England in great numbers, and John Gould was established as the dominant figure in Australian ornithology. Encouragement was not forthcoming. Frustrated and disappointed, Cotton died in December 1849.

About 120 pages of Cotton’s bird drawings are extant, including two sketchbooks and forty loose sheets. These came at last into the caring hands of his great-granddaughter, the Baroness Casey of Berwick, and are now in the La Trobe Library. That Cotton possessed genuine artistic talent is clear from his drawings, whether copies or originals, of scenes, landscapes and figures in his various notebooks, especially the drawings of birds. The hand-coloured copper engravings and engraving/etchings of his Song Birds have a simple Regency charm and often catch the life of the species, while his drawings of Australian birds and their settings in pencil, pen and watercolour are outstanding. Most are preliminary sketches and therefore have spontaneity and freshness. There are also several finely finished drawings done with the brush alone.

Cotton was also one of Australia’s earliest resident photographers, apparently acquiring an interest in taking daguerreotypes from the pioneer dilettante painter and photographer George Alexander Gilbert whose brother Frank Gilbert was a tutor to Cotton’s children. There are various references to daguerreotypy in Cotton’s correspondence edited by G. Mackaness.By October 1846 he had received daguerreotype apparatus from London and was planning to sell portraits of the Aborigines in London, although brother William Cotton doubted if photographs of 'ugly natives’ would be a commercial proposition. In June 1848 John informed William that he had taken 'several portraits … of my sons-in-law and their wives, some of the blacks &c.’ Cotton died in 1849 awaiting a new batch of daguerreotype plates. No examples of his plates are known.

Writers:

McEvey, Allan
newtog

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2022