This drawing and another (FT025) are views of the small lake at Peamore, an estate near Exeter where Towne and Abbott sketched throughout their lives. Perhaps the reds in this watercolour mark this as an autumn scene but, beyond that, these Peamore views are difficult to locate in time.

To give the argument in favour of a later dating, the watercolour has a close affinity with a Werrington view dated 1796 (FT588), and there are points of comparison with other works of a broadly similar date. The densely grouped tree trunks are also seen in the left part of an Acland commission of 1790 (FT556), the tight hatchings and stiffness of the trees resembles somewhat the Kensington Gardens of 1797 (FT591), and a landscape dated 1800 (FT622) shares something of this work’s interest in wandering branches. Most of Towne’s experiments in pure watercolour date from the late 1780s and 1790s. Possibly the drawing catalogued here is associated with other mounted views of Peamore of the same size, none of which is outlined in pen and one of which is dated 1787 (FT391, FT544, FT545); there are also similarities with an undated study at Werrington (FT589a), which is surely a fairly late work. Leonard Duke, who owned FT026, implied that he believed it to have been influenced by John Sell Cotman’s Greta drawings of 1805, though that seems unlikely. That aside, Duke’s Peamore view does share with another Peamore view, dated 1804 (FT629), its basic composition and effects, though the two differ greatly in technique (both are dark and dense woodland views in which tree trunks provide the structure, and the sky is visible only piecemeal through the trees, whose tops are cut off from view).

The problem with a late dating is that the man Towne mentions in his inscription, Richard Hippisley Coxe, died in August 1786 and, although it is impossible to say how soon Towne became aware of this, it surely places the work to 1786 at the latest.