The founder of Bridport Museum, Captain Alfred Percy Codd, was an amateur watercolour painter. When he opened the Museum in 1932, he bequeathed many of his own paintings for the inaugural displays.

Object number BRPMG 2676 in our collection is a large album of 32 watercolours of scenes of his travels. The index at the front is rather a long gazeteer of the British Isles and Europe, spanning Codd’s home in Beaminster to Heidelberg, via Bridgnorth, Bath, Burnham and Barnstaple. The album dates from the late 19^th Century- a time when perhaps watercolour painting was the Instagram of its day. Although photography had been invented some 50 to 60 years earlier, portable cameras such as the Kodak were only just being developed in the 1880s, so it is unlikely that a man such as Codd, then in his forties, would have carried one with him.

The volume captures one man’s carefully documented pilgrimage, a celebration of the natural landscape and place. The haphazard nature of the travels reflected in the sense of order he may have been trying to achieve with the crossings-out, amendments and re-ordering of the index list. It feels like a labour of love.  Codd had retired from the Army, where he had achieved the rank of Captain, in 1889, when he was only 32 years old. He spent the rest of his life, travelling and painting.

Of particular interest to me is the section at the bottom ‘Turner sketches- etc.’ Codd was something of a J.M.W. Turner fanatic. As a younger man, he had spent many days in London at the National Gallery, carefully analysing and copying many of Turner’s paintings. Several of these are mounted at the end of this album.

Although Codd’s book might technically be called an album, with the individual paintings mounted inside, it still has somewhat of the feel of a sketchbook about it. The kind that had become popular with artists such as Turner and Constable almost 100 years earlier. When it became fashionable to paint ‘directly from nature’ as opposed to the studio, a sketchbook was the vital weapon in the artist’s armoury- using it to capture scenes, document and observe, as well as to record notes and thoughts. J.M.W. Turner produced around 30,000 sketches in 300 sketchbooks, now all owned by Tate Britain.

In Summer 2019 we ‘reunited’ Codd with his idol, when were were able to borrow an original Turner painting of West Bay from Bury Art Museum in Lancashire.  The painting went on display as part of an exhibition between June and September, nestled between the copies made so devotedly by one of Turner’s most ardent students.

You can explore more of Codd’s paintings via our Flickr album.

Emily Hicks, Director

(adapted from an article original published in The Bridport Times)

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