In the PhD thesis version of this catalogue this drawing was allocated a place among Towne’s very earliest drawings and was compared with a 1773 Ugbrooke drawing (FT034). When it was offered for sale at Sotheby’s in 2006, this author persisted with that opinion against the better judgment of Henry Weymss.¹ However, since then it has been possible to study the lakeside study of Peamore in New York and other works of the later 1780s and 1790s, and although an early date is not out of the question, it seems more likely that it belongs in the later period. That, also, is where Oppé appears to have placed it, describing the drawing thus: “228 Werrington Dairy. Hot[?] brown & blue nearest to 202 [FT435, dated 1785]. no pen loose rich.”² The inscription is certainly in a mature hand, unlike early inscriptions, and consistent with inscriptions of the late 1780s and 1790s. The tree branch flicks seen in the top left of the drawing are also present in the undated lakeside study at Peamore (FT024) and in the undated Werrington study (FT589a), the latter of whose overall composition is broadly similar, consisting of a V-shaped tree in the right-of-centre foreground, with a river flowing to the bottom left. The freedom with which Towne has drawn the crazed main tree here is also out of character with the more delicate and posed trees of his earliest work. And, although no coloured works survive from the early 1770s that might permit a detailed comparison, the sky in this drawing has a sunset effect that Towne often used in work of the 1780s.