Landscape with Cottage (recto); Studies of Heads (verso)

Dr. Thomas Monro is best known as a patron who exercised significant influence in the London art world in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, but he was also an amateur artist and competent follower of Thomas Gainsborough. The physician’s drawings were monochromatic, done in wash with additions of charcoal, chalk, or india ink in emulation of Gainsborough’s moody rural views. On the verso of the drawing is a mise-en-page of caricatures and a hillside—perhaps whimsically drawn by multiple artists at one of the doctor’s salons.