In this atmospheric early winter scene, Farquharson's viewpoint is from the Abbey

Craig, on the north bank of the River Forth, near Stirling. By the mid 1880s,

his faculty of memory and impression had superseded that of observation, and

Farquharson's interest is in the light falling on the sinuous course of the river, its

pale silver coil disappearing into mist. Some years before, he had painted a much

larger version of this view which featured the smoking chimneys of Alloa and the

distant ridge of Arthur's Seat.1 Whilst his choice of a panoramic subject harks back

to seventeenth century Dutch artists such as Philip de Konink, the treatment of light

on the river recalls, perhaps unconsciously, the work of Belgian Symbolists of his own

day. In the present painting topography has given way to the evocation of mood.