The goatherd: View on the Galleria di Sopra above the Lake of Albano

John Robert Cozens, the son of the distinguished painter and artistic theorist Alexander Cozens, was taught by his father, and through him developed a love of Italian scenery. Together with connoisseur and collector Richard Payne Knight, the young artist made his first journey to Europe in the late summer of 1776.

For eighteen months Cozens worked in and around Rome, captivated by the quality of light and the changing atmospheric moods of the Italian landscape. Clearly inspired by the example of revered seventeenth-century masters Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin and Gaspard Dughet, he adapted and enhanced their classical compositional formulas in numerous depictions of fabled sites, including the Galleria di Sopra. This was a crucial period in the development of the artist’s innovative and poetic watercolour style, in which he realised the hitherto unexplored potential of the medium to evoke a subjective and lyrical response to landscape subjects. Cozens continually refined his technique, but deliberately restricted his palette to almost monochromatic modulations of browns, greys and airy blues. His extraordinary manipulation of watercolour resulted in the creation of works on paper with the scale, presence and beauty of oil paintings.

Text by Nick Williams from Prints and Drawings in the International Collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2003, p. 76.