Lake Lucerne (oil on paper laid on canvas)

Harding, who was Ruskin’s drawing master and sketching companion, ‘had religious views in sympathy with his pupil’ (WG Collingwood,The Life of John Ruskin London, 1900, p. 81). Harding’s theories on landscape painting, which were widely published, anticipated Ruskin’s in fundamental ways: Harding believed in the truth and variety of nature, as invented and ordered by God, and that painting landscape was a man-made language for the expression of the landscape. Direct observation was therefore the vocabulary, and a knowledge of other painters the grammar of painting. In this open-air sketch on paper, simply interpreting sky, mountains and water, Harding has used none of his usual compositional props of figures or architecture - not even a boat.