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Cozen's landscape systems, though they found a receptive audience among certain artists, were too confusing and susceptible to ridicule and parody to gain wide public acceptance. The Rev. William Gilpin's writings on the Picturesque were, by contrast, hugely popular and influential with both artists and a wider public a wider public. Beginning with his Observations on the River Wye, published in 1782 but based on a trip down the river in 1770, Gilpin popularized the Picturesque as a distinct aesthetic category, a species of beauty appropriate to pictures but also applicable to natural scenery. In its simplest formulation the Picturesque was 'that peculiar kind of beauty, which is agreeable in a picture."
Gilpin experimented with Cozens's blot method and his own drawings of which this brooding woodland scene is a particularly grand example, are indebted to Cozens in their bold, simplified forms and dark, monochromatic character, If the inscription on the verso, supplied by a descendant in the nineteenth century, is accurate, Gilpin made the drawing between his Wye tour in 1770 and his tour of the Lakes in 1772 (published in 1786). It is unclear whether the drawing represents an actual location or is the kind of imaginary landscape Cozens' methods were meant to promote.

Scott Wilcox

Wilcox, Forrester, O'Neil, Sloan. The Line of Beauty: British Drawings and Watercolors of the Eighteenth Century. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 2001. pg. 61 cat. no. 46