Like that of a number of the Glasgow Boys artists, Lavery's painting style underwent a transformation, when he turned from the broken, square brushwork of his early pictures to a smoother and more fluid application of paint, inspired by the example of Whistler. Since the publication in the early nineteenth century of Walter Scott's poem, The Lady of the Lake, Loch Katrine had become a major tourist attraction. Lavery acknowledges this, and gives human scale to the idyllic natural setting by his inclusion of the tiny foreground figure (possibly Lavery's wife) sketching the view.