Travellers at a signpost on a windy heath - evening

One of David Cox's atmospheric late watercolours, the present evening scene is impressionistic in technique and rich in colour. The composition incorporates elements of Keep the Left Road and Wind, Rain, and Sunshine, the latter a subject being one that had occupied Cox since he saw Turner's Rain, Steam and Speed at the Royal Academy in 1844. In these late watercolours of travellers on windy heaths and moors the topography is never identified, although Cox's biographer Solly believed that the large (and related) The Cross Roads (1849) was based on the scenery of Carrington Moss near Sale in Cheshire.