Last Friday visited the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, where they have seven sketchbooks by the eighteenth century English watercolour painter, John Robert Cozens. It so happened that the sketchbooks were being displayed in a glass case in an exhibition entitled The Land Between Us – place, power and dislocation but what was on display was well worth the trip – in particular an especially mouth-watering pencil and wash sketch of Vesuvius as glimpsed from the myrtle plantation at Sir William Hamilton’s villa at Portici, and dated August 18^th, 1782.

In common with other great British watercolourists such as Francis Towne, Thomas Girtin, John Frederick Lewis, John Sell Cotman and Edward Lear – but with the notable exception of Turner - John Robert Cozens is a chronically under appreciated artist. Turner had the grace to say that had Tom Girtin lived he should have starved, and Constable paid a similarly handsome compliment to John Robert Cozens, calling him the greatest genius that ever touched landscape.

John Robert was fortunate to be the son of another artist of originality and distinction, Alexander Cozens, but less fortunate perhaps in his personal demeanour - “of a silent, hesitating disposition, and grave manners” as a contemporary described him. He visited Italy twice, firstly, in 1778, under the patronage of Richard Payne Knight, and secondly in the entourage of the “sensitive, spoiled and unconventional” writer, William Beckford, whose keen sensibility to the scenery and the artistic treasures of Italy were perhaps as much of a trial as an inspiration to the young Cozens. At all events Cozens’s friend the Welsh artist Thomas Jones (another highly original talent, though not in water colour) spoke of Beckford’s departure from Naples in September 1782 as having left Cousins (as he spells the name) “once more a free Agent and loosed from the Shackles of fantastic folly and Caprice.” Beckford later referred to Cozens as an ungrateful scoundrel, for what reason we do not know.

What distinguishes the Portici sketch is the entirely convincing way in which a huge panorama of mountain scenery and flat middle distance has been captured on two leaves of a sketchbook measuring about 18 inches by 9 – with the centrefold running down the middle. It consists of light pencil markings (including words like “woods” and “green & rock”) on laid paper, and then quickly washed over with a grayish wash. Part of its attraction is the speed with which it was evidently executed. There are no signs of erasures or corrections; this is the seemingly effortless work of a superb observer and executant at the top of his form.

If there was one word to describe this sketch it would be the epithet so beloved of the hippy generation, “cool”, a value which was well understood in the eighteenth century, though they preferred to speak in terms of irony, understatement and in general the classical pose of “nil admirari”. You come across it all over the place, in Swift, in Pope, in Fielding, in Gibbon, and in the cut and thrust of daily conversation: “Pray, Mr Quin, do you ever make love?” the Duchess of Queensberry asked the actor James Quin. “No, Madam, I always buy it ready made.”

Up until reading his observations about Cozens in his book Landscape and Memory I’d always been a bit of a fan of Simon Schama’s, but now I’m beginning to have reservations… Quite simply Schama’s version of John Robert is (in my view anyway) almost ludicrously overcooked and over elaborate. The artist comes across as transcendentally self-absorbed and angst-ridden, and his works seen as eerie, surreal, hallucinated, unearthly. Disorientation and the scrambling of perception is the key to it: “We have been pulled into a universe of representation where something has got in the way between art and its ostensible object.” To which the skeptical reader (as well as wondering what that something might be) is tempted to respond, “scrambling of perception, indeed.”

This kind of overheated language may be appropriate for the likes of that “bona fide ecstatic” as Schama terms Beckford, but it is not appropriate for J.R. Cozens – even when he is painting his stunning representations of the Alps, or his equally stunning caverns in the Campagna. Schama chooses to dwell on “creative disordering”, but the term “creative ordering” would appear to be just as appropriate. Schama himself is perhaps open to the charge of creative disordering by implying that the artist’s eventual succumbing to mental illness was a natural sequel of an alleged “sensory brinkmanship” brought on by staring into sublimity without wearing sunglasses.

“When John Robert actually faced the mountain summit from the ledges, the imperial prospect that ought to have been yielded up to any confident eighteenth-century enlightened mind rushed past him. His head swam. His brush floated vaporously over the page. His art soared. And when his masterpieces had been accomplished, he went mad.”

Here is vaporous brushwork with a vengeance. Or the kind of swaggering, overconfident verbal pyrotechnics that offer an entertaining caricature of Cozens as yet another unstable, tormented Romantic loony, rather than giving us the real artist who, as Constable said, "touched" landscape. Touched, not twisted be it noted.

By way of postscript it’s worth noting that when Cozens painted the Portici sketch he had just recovered from a bout of malaria. Only a week or two later that amiable and musical lady, Catherine, Sir William Hamilton’s first wife, died. Nine months later her body was brought back to Wales for burial on the family estate at Slebech.

Alain de Botton presented an interesting “Point of View “ on Radio 4 yesterday (Sunday) – a sort of “Thought for the Day” on wheels. The general gist of it was that, largely due to gadgets and modern technology, and a relentless obsession with news and current events, we have lost the ability to concentrate. Well, if concentration, as it no doubt is, is such a good thing, then let’s start by concentrating on what Alain has to say.

I don’t profess to be a philosopher, but some of his arguments seem questionable. To start with, his notion that the news occupies in the secular sphere much the same position of authority that the liturgical calendar has in the religious one. Is that really so? I’m a news junkie myself, but 24 hour news, while it may command attention, doesn’t have authority as such. Can a commodity which is so shifting and variable be said to occupy the niche filled by public worship in accordance with a prescribed form, which is what liturgy is? For religious believers there is no doubt as to what constitutes liturgy. Some news sources are regarded as more reliable than others, but what constitutes news is largely a matter of opinion and personal preference. News for the Sun reader is not news for the Guardian reader, and vice versa. Same goes for BBC World Service news and (say) Fox news. We freely pick and choose, which (whatever other virtues they may have) is not what the creyentes do.

Alain says that religious faith seldom has the need “to alter insights or harvest them incrementally through news bulletins. The great stable truths can be written down on vellum or carved into stone, rather than swirling malleably across hand-held screens.”

You don’t have to be a card-carrying humanist to wonder about these “great stable truths” which might be better described as grand categorical assertions, with plenty of potential to create interdenominational, inter-faith and indeed international conflict. Maybe the human project is better served by less in the way of dogma and more in the way of intellectual and moral independence, agnosticism, openness and fluidity. If the liberal view is right, and that you are best trying to figure philosophical stuff out for yourself , then Google and Wikipedia are probably going to be more of a help than recourse to the Bible, the Torah or the Koran.

Alain says that we pay a price for our promiscuous involvement with morality, whereas religion reminds us of the same old things – eternal quieter truths that we know about in theory, but don’t practise. There are two unwarrantable assumptions here – 1. That those who know about these allegedly eternal quieter truths necessarily practise them, and 2. that those who don’t have religious faith have no proper engagement with morality, and are deprived of access to such truths. It’s not entirely accidental, perhaps that Alain uses terms like guilt (“guilty for all that we’ve not yet read”) and “decadence” –from which the secular apparently need to be purged.

Give people enough rope and they will hang themselves, seems to be the thought. “How free secular society leaves us by contrast. It expects that we will spontaneously find our way to the ideas that matter to us... “ Like science, “it privileges discovery, it associates repetition with punitive shortage, presenting us with an incessant stream of novelty.” This is a scenario that’s difficult to recognize. Does the modern entertainment industry work in that way? On the contrary, most of what it produces, far from privileging discovery, seems to privilege fatuous repetition of tired formulae.

“We’re reluctant to admit that we’re simply swamped with information, and have lost the ability to make sense of it.”

Well, yes and no. There is certainly more information out there than any individual could possibly use, but Alain underestimates people’s ability to navigate their way around all that stuff and harvest information for their own purposes, thus making themselves potentially freer and better informed than any other generation in history. The internet is far from perfect (Wikipedia articles on 18^th century writers are all too often items pillaged directly from the 11^th edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica) but it gets better all the time. What educated users of it do, almost by second nature, is to customize the thing – to bookmark their favourite sites, and fabricate their own hierarchy of values. This is what intelligent people have always done. Before the internet they were collecting their favourite books and organizing them in a certain way. For every sad soul that is lost and floundering in a fathomless sea of electronic information, I bet you there are ten whose understanding of real-life issues has been much enhanced, and whose contact with like-minded souls, has been greatly facilitated.

“Our minds, no less than our bodies, require periods of fasting”, says Alain. Not a bad idea, from time to time. But we don’t necessarily have to do that in a religious context - though it would be a mistake to take too narrow a view of religious contexts. It’s a long time since I visited in the cloisters of Rabelais’s Abbey of Thelema, but from what I recollect, it was a lot of fun. I admit, it wasn’t your conventional idea of a religious establishment.

Alain needs to cut down on Tolstoy and Chekhov, and cheer up a bit. The Rabelaisian abbey might do the trick. If not, he should just try and get out and about a bit more.