Borrowdale, Cumbria

Borrowdale, Cumbria from 1821 by William Collins captures one of the Lake District's most celebrated valleys, a landscape made famous by Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the other Romantic poets who had turned the north of England into a pilgrimage site for artistic and literary sensibility. Collins was one of the most popular landscape painters of the early nineteenth century, his coastal and rural scenes combining naturalistic observation with warm sentimental appeal. Borrowdale's dramatic scenery—the valley enclosed by fells, the River Derwent threading through the dale, the distinctively craggy Cumbrian geology—gave Collins a subject of genuine sublimity. The painting is held at the Guildhall Art Gallery, London. Collins painted with careful naturalistic oil technique, his treatment of the Lake District demonstrating his ability to work at the scale of sublime landscape while retaining the warm emotional tone that made his domestic coastal subjects so popular with Royal Academy audiences.

The valley landscape is rendered with attention to the dramatic geological formations and atmospheric conditions of the Lake District. Collins's handling of the mountainous terrain demonstrates his ability to work at the scale of sublime landscape.