The above picture can be viewed at the Victoria and Albert Museum – London
© Clare Padfield
Reprinted from: Saffron Walden Historical Journal No 7 Spring 2004
How often while searching for something pertinent and appropriate to the study one is undertaking, does one come across, by chance, a missing fragment of history amongst what one initially considered to be a random collection of data?
When Dr Roderick Lumsden and I began searching through two boxes of documents at the Museum in Saffron Walden, we were looking for anything that might enlighten us as to the complex history of his property, No 33 Church Street. My task as a garden historian was to collect as much information about the site as was available. By chance, Bruce Tice told us that two boxes of documents, as yet uncatalogued, had been recently deposited at the Museum.
Our search gradually revealed the history of another family in Church Street, one that produced one of our finest watercolour painters, John Sell Cotman. It appears from the documents that we could read, that James Sell a yarn maker living at No 17 Church Street, could be John Sell Cotman’s maternal grandfather. James Sell, it emerged, had four daughters. Two married locally: Elizabeth married Robert Blackman, a liquor merchant who lived at No 35 Church Street; another, Sophia was married to John Challis. However two of James’s daughters, Mary and Ann married two brothers from Norwich, John and Edmund Cotman. Ann and Edmund Cotman, a hairdresser from Norwich, were the parents of John Sell Cotman.
The deed we found documented the assigning of a large legacy to the Cotman, Blackman and Challis families in 1817. It is clearly signed by John Sell Cotman. It is not clear without further research why the funds were distributed as late as 1817, when it appears that James Sell died in 1800, leaving his property in Church Street to his wife, who continued to live there until 1811. The deed delivers funds to the families of James Sell’s children from James Sell’s executor George Eachus. Eachus was an apothecary and James Sell’s neighbour at No 19 Church Street. From what we could read it is possible that James Sell left £200 to his children and their offspring, a considerable sum in 1817.
Until our chance discovery nothing was known about John Sell Cotman’s mother, other than she and her sister married two brothers from Norwich. The connection with Saffron Walden is apparently undocumented in Cotman’s correspondence or by his biographer Sidney Kitson.