Alexander Cozens

[3] In 1751, he was nominated to serve as Rouge Croix Pursuivant at the College of Arms but never received his Letters Patent enabling him to take up the office.

He gave lessons to the Prince of Wales, Sir George Beaumont, and William Beckford, arguably, the three most important British art patrons and collectors of their generation.

[6] The style used by Cozens before he finally settled in Britain may be seen in a collection of fifty-four early drawings, mostly Italian scenes, in the British Museum.

In most there is little sky, but in one he has attempted a bold effect of sunlight streaming through cloud, and brightly illuminating several distinct spots in the landscape.

After his arrival in Britain he appears, from some drawings in the Victoria and Albert Museum, to have adopted a much broader style, aiming at an imposing distribution of masses and large effects of light and shade.

[6] Henry Angelo, who (like Sir George Beaumont) was his pupil at Eton, described Cozens' unusual method of teaching in his Reminiscences: Cozens dashed out upon several pieces of paper a series of accidental smudges and blots in black, brown, and grey, which being floated on, he impressed again upon other paper, and by the exercise of his fertile imagination, and a certain degree of ingenious coaxing, converted into romantic rocks, woods, towers, steeples, cottages, rivers, fields, and waterfalls.

[6][7] Cozens defined a blot as "a production of chance with a small degree of design" and acknowledged the influence on his ideas of a passage in Leonardo da Vinci's Treatise on Painting, which recommends that artists should look for inspiration in stains or marks on old walls.

In 1778 Cozens published Principles of Beauty relative to the Human Head (a work "of more ingenuity than value"),[6] with nineteen engravings by Francesco Bartolozzi.