This work, like lot 15, is one of a group of what seem to have been presentation drawings, all originally mounted in a distinctive way with gold-tooled Gardens and usually bearing a printed signature just outside the edge of a design (see Hayes, op. cit., p. 26). The group is also distinguished by the presence of what looks like underdrawing in an oily black chalk. This used to be thought to be the result of transference from another sheet of paper or 'offset' (see L. Binyon, Catalogue of Drawings by British Artists in the British Museum, vol. II, 1900, p. 176, and Hayes, op. cit., pp. 14, 15, 25) but Lindsay Stainton, with the tacit agreement of John Hayes, now thinks that this is exceedingly unlikely: the only reason for such a process would have been to produce duplicates and examination has shown that the lines in one of the examples in the British Museum (Hayes no. 586) are characteristic of a right-handed draughtsman like Gainsborough, rather than reversed as would be the case in an offset (J. Hayes and L. Stainton, Gainsborough Drawings, exhibition catalogue, Washington, D.C., International Exhibitions Foundation, 1983, pp. 168-70 under no. 76). As Stainton suggests, the distinctive appearance of this group of drawings may be in part the result of Gainsborough'#s experiments with soft-ground etching and the imitation of oil technique in the 1770s, though she and Hayes date this group of work to the mid 1780s. Stainton also points out the affinity of this group of drawings to examples Marco Ricci (one repr. loc. cit) which suggests that Gainsborough may have set out to appeal to the collectors of Old Master drawings