Peamore was an estate just south of Exeter, and “a spot of no common beauty”.¹ From the 1740s it was the home of the Hippisley Coxe family, after John Hippisley Cox’s marriage to Mary, daughter and heiress of Stephen Northeigh of Peamore. Richard Hippisley Coxe (1742–1786, MP for Somerset 1768–84) was born at Peamore and inherited the estate on his father’s death in 1769.² Coxe was in poor health from 1775—indeed he was declared insane in 1784. This drawing is surely a work commissioned by Coxe and evidently formed part a group numbering at least three.

Wilcox observed that the arch in Towne’s drawing was among landscape improvements undertaken in ca. 1750: “It provided a feature at the end of one of the principal pathways from the house (whose roof is glimpsed here in the distance) leading to the densely wooded higher ground known as ‘The Rock’.”³

Stylistically this drawing is comparable to A View at Pynes, 1778 (FT143), although here the description of the trees is far more complex. However, as Towne’s trees are usually masses of dense foliage where structural elements like tree trunks are insignificant, this work is fairly untypical. It is notable how Towne’s ideas of harmony, flow, and organisation are imposed on what is ostensibly a close study of nature. The eye is directed to foliage immediately above the arch through Towne’s creation of an oval shape bounded on the left by the foreground shadow, rising up towards the mid-level branch that extends right towards the centre of the page and whose boundary is carried on by a sagging branch of the main tree, which leads towards a small, swaying tree on the far right and returns to the left with the shaded mid-ground to the right of the arch. The role of this oval shape is to emphasise the area of blank sky at its centre, which draws the viewer’s eye into the space imagined by the picture.