The quest for character over precision in representing nature was an established characteristic of the Birmingham School of landscape artists with which Cox had been associated early in his life, and as early as 1810 Cox's work had been criticised for its "sketchiness of finish" and "cloudy confusion of objects", which were held to betray "the coarseness of scene-painting". During the 1840s and 1850s Cox took this "peculiar manner" to new extremes, incorporating the techniques of the sketch into his finished works to a far greater degree.