David Cox Senior was an English landscape painter, mainly specialising in watercolours. When he was younger he worked as a scenic painter in Birmingham, then in 1804 moved to London, where he took up watercolour, receiving lessons from John Varley. He lived in Hereford between 1814-1827, and in London between 1827-1841, before retiring to Harborne, near Birmingham (it is now a suburb of the city), from where he made annual sketching tours to the Welsh mountains. In spite of a certain anecdotal homeliness, his style was broad and vigorous, and in 1836 he began to paint on a rough Scottish wrapping paper that was particularly suited to it. A similar paper was made commercially and marketed as ‘Cox Paper’. Cox devoted much of his time to teaching and he wrote several instructional books on watercolour; in the last two decades of his life he also worked a good deal in oils.