This exceptional example of Grimshaw's early style, painted when the artist was twenty-eight, has recently been on extended loan to the Tate. It dates from 1864 when he was greatly inspired by the Pre-Raphaelites, whose work he had had may opportunities to study in his native Leeds. Examples would often be displayed by local dealers or included in the annual exhibitions organised by the Leeds Philsophical and Literary Society, which were supported by local collectors of Pre-Raphaelite paintings such as Ellen Heaton and the stockbroker T.E. Plint. Leeds also boasted its own Pre-Raphaelite painter in J.W. Inchbold, who had made contact with the Brotherhood in London and earned the admiration of Ruskin for his application of Pre-Raphaelite principles to landscape. There is no evidence of his meeting Grimshaw, who was six years his junior, but he seems to have influenced the younger artist, whose technique in the 1860s was remarkably similar.

Grimshaw took up painting professionally in 1861 or early 1962, abandoning a job as a clerk with the Great Northern Railway to do so. His earliest known paintings date from 1861 and are still-life subjects, probably influenced by 'Birds Nest' Hunt. Gradually, however, landscape claimed his attention, and in 1863 he painted the ambitious Windermere (Robertson, op.cit., pls. 8, 10) which, in its brilliant colouring and precise foreground detail, foreshadows the present painting. Still closer is The Boulder Stone, Borrowdale (Tate Gallery; Robertson, pls.11, 12), which Robertson describes in terms which apply equally well here: 'As in other Lakeland and Yorkshire subjects, everything is brightly coloured and seen in a clear light, presenting a dazzling landscape of a startling, Pre-Raphaelite kind. The handling is delicate and precise, the drawing sharp, the paintwork enamel-like in its hardness.'In both the Borrowdale and our picture Grimshaw has adhered to the Pre-Raphaelite practice of painting over a white ground, which gives great huminosity to his brilliant, unnatural colours.

Many of these paintings were based on photographs, a method sanctioned by Ruskin, who saw the daguerrotype as a valuable aide-mémoire for artists. Nab Scar is an example, the correspponding photograph by Thomas Ogle of Penrith being preserved in Grimshaw's photograph album, now in the Leeds City Art Gallery (Robertson, pl.96). To compare this with the painting is fascinating. The entire foreground has been added and there are innumerable lesser changes, not only the introduction of such picturesque touches as the ripples on the lake but a constant adjusting and repositioning of forms and shapes - the white building on the water's edge, the paths which climb the hill behind it, the clumps of trees dotting the hillside, and the contour of the 'scar' itself. The photograph is pure raw material and totally unmemorable; the painting has a formal perfection and a dream-like inevitability that only art could give it.