A Lake with Buildings and a Distant Hill 

Editor: Here we have Alexander Cozens' "A Lake with Buildings and a Distant Hill." It's undated, but it feels so immediate and raw. How do you interpret this sketch? Curator: Cozens was working within a very specific social landscape, the burgeoning picturesque movement. Consider its connection to ideas of land ownership and enclosure. Does this idealized vision obscure realities of dispossession and inequality? Editor: I hadn't thought about it that way, but I can see how the seemingly natural scene can also be a coded assertion of power. Curator: Exactly. And how does his technique – the sketchiness, the lack of detail – contribute to that distancing, that abstraction of lived experience? Food for thought.