| 介绍（英） | An influential drawing master and theorist, Alexander Cozens was also a successful landscape artist. Born in Russia to English parents in 1717, Cozens was educated in England and, around 1746, spent two years in Rome as one of the earliest British artists to complete their artistic education on the Continent. The present landscape drawing is an example of the artist’s work from the late 1750s to mid-1760s and draws heavily from Cozens’s experiences in Italy, reflecting his engagement with both the scenery and the work of contemporary landscape painters like Joseph Vernet, with whom Cozens was closely associated in Rome.
During this time, Cozens experimented with different styles and techniques of drawing, creating both quick and expressive tonal sketches as well as highly detailed works with careful and precise linework. The present drawing is a more refined, less formulaic application of the latter technique, utilizing a more dynamic and fluid handling of the brush. With its fine and tightly controlled hatching in brown ink, the drawing is similar in style to a group of works dated 1763, examples of which can be found at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the Huntington Libraries and Museums, San Marino, and Tate, London.
Iconographically, the work reflects Cozens’s concern with classical landscape imagery, and includes many of the motifs he first experimented with in Italy, such as the framing tree on the right, the winding river, its Italianate buildings, and hilly background. These elements are typical of Cozens’s work in this period and continue to inform his iconographic repertoire throughout the 1760s.
During the early 1760s, Cozens was an eager early participant of some of London’s first public art exhibitions, and in 1762 won a prize for his oil painting "An historical landscape, representing the retirement of Timolean." But Cozens most frequently exhibited drawings and watercolors, and the present work may have been such an exhibition piece or may have been a small-scale preparatory drawing for a larger work. |