Albert Goodwin was born in Maidstone, England in 1845, just three years before the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded, and two years after the publication of Ruskin's first volume of Modern Painters. These dates are significant because it was in the artistic circles generated by Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites that Goodwin developed as an artist - first in the studio of Arthur Hughes, then under the supervision of F M Brown, and finally as a protégé of Ruskin.

Although the Pre-Raphaelites were not primarily landscape painters, their views on 'truth to nature', and their practice of working directly from nature for the landscape settings of their pictures, inevitably influenced most contemporary landscape painters in the 18...