View of Lake Como with Monte Leoni. Artist: Francis Towne (British, Isleworth, Middlesex 1739-1816 Exeter). Dimensions: Sheet: 6 1/8 × 8 1/4 in. (15.6 × 21 cm). Date: August 27, 1781.Towne belongs to a small group of British artists who worked in Italy in the latter 18th century, and stimulated one another to experiment in ways that proved foundational to the development of English watercolor practice. This drawing shows a gray cliff plunging into the lake at right, a sunlit shoreline beyond backed by mountains, with the distant peak of Mount Leoni largely obscured by clouds. The artist made a series of drawings from a boat, here leaving fingerprints in the pigment at lower center. He had departed Exeter in late summer 1780, spent nearly a year around Rome and Naples, then headed home via the Italian lakes and Switzerland. Other sheets from the sketchbook that contained this drawing are at Tate Britain and the Yale Center for British Art. Museum: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,