Pencil, pen and watercolour on paper depicting the interior of Crosby Hall, Bishopsgate, by John Sell Cotman. Great Britain, 1831.

Pencil, pen and watercolour on paper depicting the interior of Crosby Hall, Bishopsgate, London. Signed and dated by the artist.

The late medieval merchant's house, Crosby Hall, was located on Bishopsgate Street in London. Its rich historical associations doubtless appealed to Cotman's romantic sense of the past. It was also a subject redolent of melancholy and neglect, for when Cotman saw it, the hall 'though one of the most elegant specimens of ancient domestic architecture in England; the residence of princes, and the theatre of great and interesting transactions [was] … converted into a common warehouse'. In 1831 it was 'greatly mutilated, and obscured by bales of goods,' leaving the highly ornamented timber-work of the roof as the single dominant visible feature. Unlike Nash, Cotman has not peopled this shell of a building with characters from an imaginative past, but lets the building itself speak for its past. The pair of scales on the tabletop and the goods covered in cloth are poignant signs of the mercantile use of the Hall that Cotman witnessed.

P.19-1927