Inspired by J.M.W. Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites, Albert Goodwin exhibited at the Royal Academy in London from the age of fifteen. He studied with Arthur Hughes and Ford Madox Brown, learning the Pre-Raphaelite principles of observation and beauty in nature, and their romanticism and poetic intensity are visible in his work throughout his career. By the early 1870s he had come under the eye of John Ruskin, and in 1872 he accompanied Ruskin to Italy, the beginning of his extensive travels in both Britain and abroad. Salisbury, a favorite subject of both Turner and John Constable, was somewhere he returned to frequently, although he rarely depicted it with the dramatic, Constable-like skies and weather seen in the present drawing.