View of Harborne Church and Harborne Hall, Birmingham (recto); with a subsidiary pencil sketch of a figure on horseback in a landscape (verso)

In the summer of 1841, Cox and his wife moved from London to Harborne, a village on the outskirts of Birmingham. In the 1840s he turned increasingly to black chalk as a medium for drawing. Many, like the present watercolour, would have been executed on the spot, in the vicinity of his home.