Glen Rossie

Thomas Miles Richardson, the younger · n.d.

Medium

Watercolor and gouache, heightened with lead white, and graphite, on brown wove paper, laid down on board

Original size

26.1 × 35.3 cm (10 5/16 × 13 15/16 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Neoclassicism

Glen Rossie presents the Scottish Highlands at their most quietly dramatic — cloud-filtered light settling over a secluded valley, the landscape rendered with the kind of atmospheric depth that made Thomas Miles Richardson the Younger one of the foremost landscape watercolourists of Victorian Britain. Richardson inherited both his name and his eye from his father, but developed a distinctly personal approach rooted in extended sketching trips through Scotland and the Continent. Working on toned brown wove paper, he exploited the ground itself as a mid-value, building shadows downward with transparent washes while drawing out luminous highlights with lead white and gouache. This layered technique gave his work a solidity unusual for watercolour, straddling the boundary between the spontaneous and the considered. Richardson exhibited prolifically at the Royal Academy and the New Watercolour Society from the 1830s onwards, establishing a reputation for compositions that were ambitious in scale yet intimate in feeling — qualities clearly present in the Art Institute of Chicago's holding of this piece. The hand-painted oil reproduction translates Richardson's tonal subtlety into a medium built to last, preserving the quiet grandeur of the original while bringing a textural richness that suits the work's Highland subject beautifully.