Although in his later years Nasmyth's style lost some of its earlier crisp definition and became softer and more atmospheric, his conception of the way landscape should be organised remained a late eighteenth-century one, with a very classical approach. He sometimes worked for the theatre as a scene designer, and his arrangements of darker flanking wings of trees, leading on to a lighter distance of water and hills, is suggestive of the theatre. The collection of the Royal Institution, which commissioned this, passed to the National Galleries of Scotland on its foundation in 1850.