Resumen de Alexander Cozens's New method: the blot and general nature

Charles A. Cramer

• This essay situates Alexander Cozens's technique of “blotting” as expounded in his New Method of Assisting the Invention in Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape (1785) in the contemporaneous classical tradition of Reynolds and the Royal Academy. While most scholarship has discussed the “suggestive” and “abstract” qualities of the blot in the context of Romanticism and even modernism, the author here locates a widespread debate on painterly “techniques of generalization” in academic and picturesque theory, a debate specifically directed toward contemporaneous epistemological concerns. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.