This monumental landscape drawing is one of Alexander Cozens’s boldest and most ambitious works, produced on an unusually large scale. A sophisticated essay in light and shade and the organisation of forms and voids, this large composition can be dated to 1763 and related to an important sequence of ambitious drawings Cozens made to illustrate his ideas about morality and landscape. A successful drawing master and landscape painter, Cozens spent much of his career devising and refining various systems for producing ideal landscapes. From 1759 until his death in 1786, Cozens worked on at least five separate treatises on art ranging from basic practical advice to ambitious explorations of aesthetics. Most notably, Cozens provided a system whereby apparently accidental ‘blots’ were developed into highly refined classical landscapes. Aimed at amateurs, the ‘New Method’ codified much of the intellectual underpinning of professional painters of the period, such as Thomas Gainsborough.[1] In the present beautifully worked drawing, Cozens has composed a complex and highly structured landscape, the golden light, flat sea and unhurried activity of the figures on shore and afloat all accord with Cozens’s designation of such coastal landscapes as intending to excite feelings of safety. Preserved in exceptional condition, this rare work, ranks as one of Cozens’s most important large-format drawings.



[1] Kim Sloan, Alexander and John Robert Cozens: The Poetry of Landscape, New Haven and London, 1986, pp.36-62.

 

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