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 By the mid 1880s, his faculty of memory and impression had superseded that of observation, and Farquharson's interest is in the light falling on the sinuous course of the river, its pale silver coil disappearing into mist.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.