Loughrigg Tarn and Langdale Pikes, Westmorland

Henry Holiday greatly admired the landscape of the Lake District, and visited regularly throughout his life. The present lot was painted on his longest visit to the area, at Loughrigg Tarn. The artist established a studio at a nearby farm, whilst his house in Hampstead was being built in 1873-74. Holiday includes the imposing and jagged outline of the Langdale Pikes in the distance, which balances the composition and creates depth.

Holiday wrote in his Reminiscences (1914), 'I have visited many parts of the world. Italy, Greece, Spain, Egypt, India, America, and have revelled in the marvellous beauties to be found in them, but for concentrated loveliness I know nothing that can quite compare with the lakes and mountains of Westmorland, Cumberland and Lancashire.’

Holiday’s awe of the landscape can be seen in this sensitive portrayal of Loughrigg Tarn. The artist captures the changing conditions of the Lake District: light spreads over the mountain in the centre, whilst other peaks and hills are shaded by the overcast sky. Holiday presents his control of the medium through his ability to conjure up the varying textures of the landscape. This can be seen on the lake, where there are areas of glassines and calm, which are then contrasted by the ripples across the water that indicate gusts.

The art critic A.L. Baldry also noted the hold which the area exercised over Holiday's imagination. 'He was especially fond of wandering up hill and down dale in the Lake District,' he wrote in the catalogue of the memorial exhibition held at Walker's Galleries, London, in 1930. 'Always on these tramps he carried a sketchbook, and he made numberless notes of the wild scenery which fascinated him by its rugged bareness and its architectural dignity of line. He used sometimes to say that he had drawn every mountain in the Lakes from the top of every other mountain, a permissible boast which gives a good idea of the variety and character of his excursions'.