View of Vesuvius

Cozens visited Italy for the second time in 1782-83, leaving England in May with the wealthy patron William Beckford, reaching Rome by early July, then continuing on to Naples to stay with the British consul Sir William Hamilton. The death of their host's wife shortly afterward prompted Beckford to move on to Switzerland, but Cozens remained in Naples to recover from a lingering fever. An inscription on this outline drawing of Vesuvius indicates that the view was made at Hamilton's villa at Portici on August 18, 1782.

The drawn squares on this sketch suggest that Cozens intended to work this composition into a more highly finished, large scale watercolor painting, but no such work survives. Instead, the sketch was translated into a more fully developed drawing in green and gray wash by Thomas Girtin and J.M.W Turner for Dr. Thomas Monro, a physician and arts patron who, during the late 1790s, employed the young artists to copy Cozens’s unfinished works and outline drawings. This so-called "Monro School" version of the sketch is now in the collection of Tate Britain, London.