In 1853, Hunt travelled to the Lake District, finding inspiration and excitement in the ‘experience of mountain scenery that others might regard as inhospitable’ (Poetry of Truth, p 6). This trip provided him with material for several later pictures, including our watercolour, which is dated 1857, although it is painted from the same vantage point as a drawing done on the spot in Hunt’s sketchbook four years before. The place was identified in Poetry of Truth (the earlier drawing is illustrated on p 54): ‘The distinctive ‘U’ shaped valley is probably a view down Wasdale, from a vantage point on Sty Head, looking towards the South West.’ Stickle Tarn is in the middle ground and Harrison Stickle, one of the Langdale Pikes, is above. Hunt began painting our picture in 1856, the year that Ruskin published Modern Painters IV (subtitled Of Mountain Beauty). It was also the year that Ruskin first noticed Hunt’s paintings, describing another Lakes subject in the Royal Academy as ‘the best landscape I have seen in the exhibition for many a day – uniting a most subtle finish and watchfulness of Nature, with real and rare power of composition.’ This was the start of Ruskin’s championship of Hunt, but the great man’s enthusiasm was rarely unqualified and the following year, 1857, Ruskin wrote to Hunt: ‘You stipple too much all over, [and] lose all the value of your work by giving too much. You must try and get textures by broader brushes, & by scumbling instead of stippling’ (Poetry of Truth, p 8). One can almost feel Hunt trying to accommodate Ruskin in our watercolour, striving to eliminate all signs of labour.

Hunt did not exhibit this picture at the time, but after he moved to London in 1865 – perhaps feeling the need to sell – he sent it in to the Society of Painters in Water-Colours, where it was exhibited in 1866 poetically re-titled Climbing Shadows (previously The Langdale Pikes), and sold. The Sunday Gazette noted that our picture ‘suggests profitable study of Turner’, and when it was shown again in 1897, the year after the artist’s death, The Illustrated London News observed that ‘In one of his earliest works, “Climbing Shadows”, one sees how carefully Alfred Hunt set himself to acquire distinction, and how much more successful he was than the majority of those who adopted Pre-Raphaelite methods in keeping in view the whole of his subject, and in not allowing it to be obscured by details.’