South-East Gale at Portencross Castle, 1886 (oil on canvas)

Brett's 1886 exhibition at The Fine Art Society, 'Three Months on the Scottish Coast', consisted of 46 'sketches' and three large paintings. The sketches, on pre-prepared canvases usually in a 'double square' format, as much for ease of use as for the aptness of shape to the coastal landscapes that he painted, were painted either from a boat, or from points ashore especially when the weather was foul, from nature in single sittings of two or three hours, and each was supposed to be an unadulterated single observation, straight from nature. As he said: 'Sentiment in landscape is chiefly dependent on meteorology'. Brett took a cottage for the summer of 1886 at Portencross on the west coast of Scotland near West Kilbride, where this dramatic fourteenth century castle (where the bodies of the early Scottish Kings were taken to their final resting place on the island of Iona) stands by the sea. He had boats for the children to play about in, possibly the ones pulled up on the beach in the picture. He worked up the subject to a larger canvas which he exhibited with this, the sketch, titled with a quotation from Matthew 7.27: 'The floods came, and the winds blew and beat upon that house but it fell not, for it was founded on a rock'. Indeed the weather in the summer of 1886 was terrible - he wrote 'My sketches will prove that a sunny day has been a very rare phenomenon and altogether I have never before seen Scotland so dull and colourless....' Thanks to Charles Brett.