Dr. Hayes dates this drawing to the early 1770s, when Gainsborough produced a number of landscape drawings severely classical in composition and in a technique that gave an effect approaching the density of oil paintingss. The scene has been identified as a view of Lansdown House, known as Old Battlefield, and Weston Church, near where the artist was living at the time, but the block-like, simplified forms of the architecture suggest that Gainsborough's interest was structural rather than topographical