A vale near Matlock, Derbyshire

This radiant, atmospheric landscape is a rare example of Alexander Cozens’ work in oil. Generally celebrated for his drawings and watercolours, the discovery of this signed and dated canvas was published in The Burlington Magazine by Paul Oppé in 1954, at which time only four small oils by Cozens were known, and all were on paper. There were no fewer than ninety of his oils, some unfinished, in his son John Robert Cozens’ sale at Greenwood’s in 1794, but the vast majority still remain untraced.

Cozens was one of the earliest artists to paint the remarkable cliffs along the Derwent as it runs through Cromford and Matlock, and it is now generally recognised that his depictions had a marked influence on Joseph Wright of Derby’s own renderings of the landscape, some twenty years later. Benedict Nicolson proposed that it was from Cozens that Wright drew ‘his sense of sublimity’, and the confidence to experiment with the effects of dramatized natural light (Nicolson, loc. cit.). Furthermore, he suggested that Wright may have been led by Cozens in his inclusion of very small figures in the immediate foreground, which serve to maximise the impact of the imposing landscape they inhabit, a device which is used to great effect in the present work.