This sumptuous watercolour was painted on a trip to the Trossachs that the artist

made with Joseph Crawhall in 1893. The Trossachs are the nearest wild Highland area

to Scotland's most populated region in the Central Belt and by the late nineteenth

century they were easily accessible to artists and travellers. Brig o' Turk is a small,

slightly scattered settlement there.

Melville presents us with a radically different view of the Highlands to that of

earlier artists such as Horatio McCulloch and John MacWhirter. Where his predecessors

conveyed the sense of place with subtle tonal values and attention to aerial
perspective, Melville introduces strong saturated colour with the emphasis on foreground

rather than far vistas. His palette had been intensified by long periods spent in

Spain and the Middle East over the previous decade. The Trossachs in autumn offered

an ideal subject, and he floods the paper with myriad fluid reds, blues and russets

which mix together on the surface to brilliant effect.

J.D.Fergusson wrote that Melville's work 'opened up … the way to free painting

- not merely freedom in the use of paint, but freedom of outlook.' This watercolour

encapsulates that radical approach.