A New Method of Assisting the Invention in Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape, Plates 1-8

This album contains the first eight plates from Cozens’s drawing manual "A New Method of Assisting the Invention in Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape" (1786), in which he presented a technique he called "blotting." To make a blot, the artist smudged ink onto paper to map out the basic structure of a landscape composition. The resulting shapes could then be refined into a sketch and were meant to be the starting point of a more finished drawing or painting.

"An artificial blot," Cozens wrote, "is a production of chance, with a small degree of design; for in making it, the attention of the performer must be employed on the whole, or the general form of the composition, and upon this only; whilst the subordinate parts are left to the casual motion of the hand and the brush." Cozens’s evocation of chance was unusual, but the blots were never meant to be random. Instead, the purpose of blotting was to stimulate the artist’s imagination in creating landscape images based on the tradition and aims of classical landscape painting.

Cozens illustrated his theoretical discussion of blotting with forty-three plates, using a range of techniques, including aquatint, etching, and mezzotint. Alongside sixteen printed blots, this included twenty etchings of different kinds of skies and clouds as well as seven plates detailing the progression from blot to sketch and finished drawing. Readers of the treatise were encouraged to make their own blots, or they could trace the provided blot illustrations and rework them into landscape drawings.

The plates contained in this album are titled in the publication’s index:
1. Part of the edge or top of a hill or mountain, seen horizontally, the horizon below the bottom of the view. The horizon is the utmost bounds of the land of a flat country, or the sea, in an uninterrupted view of it to the sky.
2. The tops of hills or mountains, the horizon below the bottom of the view.
3. Groups of objects on one hand, and a flat on the other, of an irregular form next to the groups, at a moderate distance from the eye.
4. A flat of a circular form, bounded by groups of objects, at a moderate distance from the eye.
5. A narrow flat, almost parallel and next to the eye, bounded by a narrow range of groups of objects.
6. A single or principal object, opposed to the sky; as a tree, a ruin, a rock, &c. or a group of objects.
7. A high fore-ground, that is to say, a large kind of object, or more than one. Near the eye.
8. A water-fall.