On hearing of the death of Alexander Nasmyth in 1840, Sir David Wilkie described him as ‘the founder of the Landscape School of Painting in Scotland’. Indeed, the flowering of that school in the 19th century owes much to him, not least because eight of his children, trained by him in Edinburgh, painted to a professional level. Of those his son Patrick became the most celebrated becoming known as the 'English Hobemma’.

Alexander Nasmyth was one of the leading Romantic landscape painters of his day and was keenly influenced by the work of Claude Lorrain, the Dutch Golden Age masters and the burgeoning Scottish Enlightenment. He was a man of many parts, a landscape designer, architect - especially as a designer of bridges - an inventor, town planner and stage designer. Perhaps most famously he painted the most celebrated portrait of his close friend Robert Burns. His first training was in the London studio of Allan Ramsay in 1776 and Nasmyth in turn taught a young David Roberts in the 1820s.

This handsome pair of landscapes were most probably commissioned from Alexander Nasmyth, not later than 1810 - the year that his son Patrick left Scotland for London - by the Johnstone family, the owners of Alva House in the early 19th century. Dating from the 14th century Alva House had been remodelled by Robert and James Adam in the second half of the 18th century. It fell into disrepair after the First World War and was used for military target practice during the Second World War and was demolished in 1950s.

The presence of Patrick Nasmyth’s signature on one of the paintings is probably the result of an indulgent suggestion by his father. There is no discernible evidence of Patrick’s hand in either painting, though the pair date from the years that Patrick was a pupil and assistant in his father’s Edinburgh studio and he had not yet developed his own distinctive style.

The Alva estate is in Central Scotland in the county of Clackmannanshire, the river in the foreground of both paintings is the river Devon and the hills above the house are the Ochils. Nasmyth has populated both landscapes with pairs of figures fishing on the river. The paintings were most recently in the collection of Sir Raymond Johnstone, a direct descendant of the Johnstone’s of Alva, and a well respected Scottish businessman, public official and noted champion of the arts.