An album of drawings compiled by William Mason (1725-1797), including sixteen sheets by The Reverend William Gilpin, one by Alexander Cozens, and two papercuts by Mrs Siddons, in a morocco leather binding tooled in gilt

William Mason (1725-1797), poet, priest and garden designer, was also an accomplished amateur musician and painter, exhibiting at the Royal Academy between 1782 and 1786. Much influenced by Milton, he wrote one of the best-selling poems of the 18th Century, the Heroic Epistle, and mixed in literary and artistic circles which included Dr Johnson, Horace Walpole, Thomas Gray and William Gilpin. His debates within this group were crucial in the development of the idea of the Picturesque. As a garden designer, his most important and spectacular work was for his close friend Lord Harcourt at Nuneham Courtenay, Oxfordshire, and it must have been during one of his regular stays there that he acquired the papercuts by the famous actress Sarah Siddons in this album.

The Reverend William Gilpin (1724-1804) contributed sixteen drawings to the present album. The son of an accomplished amateur painter, he became a schoolmaster, before publishing his Observations on [various regions of Britain] relative chiefly to picturesque beauty between 1782 and 1809, setting out the practice of 'not merely describing; but of adapting the description of natural scenery to the principles of artificial landscape'. In these books, Gilpin's own landscape drawings were reproduced in aquatint by his nephew William Sawrey Gilpin, demonstrating his ideas. The drawings included here typify his picturesque ideals and are testament to his close friendship with Mason.