This is a version of FT175, undated, although on stylistic grounds probably dating from the mid-to late 1780s. At auction in 1925 the drawing was called “On the Porta Pia, Rome, 1780”, and on receipt of the drawing Oppé made the following description of the work’s mount and frame:

In gilt frame of some age, apparently unopened though paper back split on 3 sides . . . on back and apparently as same date as the frame (1) cardboard label “John Cozens. The Campagna near / of Rome looking towards the Sabine Mountains” in pencil (2) small square red label with Francis Towne in ink and ?in pencil 4375 (3) ?W Pars in pencil & (4) 3 in circle in centre of frame. . . . Within gilt mount. . . . Drawing, cut close or shorn with old newspaper at edges & labels of J.Pratt Nottingham looking very modern. . . . [On back of drawing] erased pencil inscription apparently = (1) above but with John Cozens under an erasure & date 1795 (?), &, also erased, directions to mounter.

This description is not wholly clear but it may be that the back of the drawing originally bore Towne’s signature, which was erased and replaced with Cozens’s. Possibly also the date, which evidently Oppé could not read clearly, had been erased, as by 1795 Cozens was by then too ill to work and the reattribution to Cozens would not have been credible. Nevertheless, Oppé’s note provides a valuable glimpse into the ways in which the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art trade attempted to reconcile Towne’s work with their limited knowledge of late eighteenth-century watercolour artists.