The Fallen Tree

A blasted tree seems to be sitting atop a hill and is set off against a cloudy sky in this imaginary landscape image. To create this work, Cozens applied washes of dark gray and brown ink to a printed impression of plate 1 from his drawing manual "A New Method of Assisting the Invention in Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape" (1786). In this publication, he presented a technique of making abstract blots by smudging ink quickly onto a sheet of paper with a thick brush. The purpose of this technique was to map out a basic compositional structure of a landscape image whilst leaving out the finer details, which were to be worked out at a later stage. By focusing on the overall composition, the technique was intended to free up the artist’s imagination in creating imaginary views. In this rare touched-up plate, the delicately hatched sky contrasts with the roughly printed black ink of the foreground and transforms the print’s abstract marks into a more easily recognizable landscape image.