JOHN COTTON, 1802-1849

Abstract

John Cotton was born at Balham Hill, Clapham Common, near London in 1802, the third son of William Cotton (Chief Clerk of the Certificates in the Long Room of the Customs House) and his wife, nie Catherine Savery, who died in 1803 after the birth of her son Edward, from anxiety, we are told, at the threat of invasion by the French. The Cottonswere reasonably rich through John's great-uncle, Charles Rogers, F.R.S., F.S.A., the connoisseur and friend of Sir Joshua Reynolds. He was a bachelor, and left his estate of town properties and a fine art collection to his sister Charlotte Cotton and her heirs. His tombstone may be seen in the congested area of Laurence Pountney Lane, near the Mansion House in London, where he had lived. The collection, which includes paintings, drawings, prints and books, was presented to the City of Plymouth in 1853 by Rogers's eldest great-nephew, William Cotton, F.S.A., third of the name. It is preserved in the Plymouth Museum and Art Gallery as the Cottonian Collection. Brought up in an atmosphere of art, surrounded by the treasures of Charles Rogers, John Cotton spent much time in drawing. As a part of his education, after leaving school he shared with his brothers the privilege of being escorted by a tutor round Britain, and later Europe, where his observant mind was excited by new sights and sounds. From this time on he kept a series of illustrated note-books, written only when some subject interested him. After leaving Oxford, where for a short time he studied law, he became articled to a firm of solicitors in Lincoln's Inn Fields, but no mention of this creeps into his records, which are filled with references to world and local events, to music and art, and later to ornithology. On 18 April 1831 he writes of a young girl who was in time to give her name to the colony where his last years were spent. The entry reads: