The rise of tourism as a popular pastime in the nineteenth century and Sir Walter Scott’s novels about the romantic past of Scotland generated a public interest in Highland scenery for which the photographic industry readily catered. The Aberdeen-based photographer, George Washington Wilson, had an acute sense of what constituted a popular view. He took enormous care in finding and composing self-contained scenes and it was the originality of his imagery, capturing effects of nature never seen before, that so fascinated his contemporaries.