3-020-996 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

"Morning-View in the Highlands of Braemar", by W.L. Leitch, in the winter exhibition of the Institute of Painters in Water Colours, 1868. Engraving of a painting. 'In subject the drawing may be regarded as belonging to a long series of views in Scotland which have proceeded from the same pencil...The scenery...will be familiar to most Scotchmen and tourists in Scotland. We are here on the crest of the principal range of the Grampians, and the height of these " highlands," although the summits of many of these mountains are, as in this view, tabular not conical, may be inferred from the facts that among them occur precipices 1000 ft. high, and that one of the mountains, Ben Macdhui, has been ascertained by the Ordnance Survey to be 20 ft. higher than Ben Nevis, heretofore regarded as the highest mountain of Great Britain. We are here in the midst of granitic mountains...Over the bare, stern, and rugged grandeur of these elemental rocks the painter has thrown the tender and translucid light of "morning"...The local colour is, further, helped by the sharp contrasts in the clear morning air of the purple heather and the grey blocks of granite débris, and by the rich-coloured hides of the herd of small black-horned Highland cattle'. From "Illustrated London News", 1868.