Trained at the Slade and South Kensington, Hallward was a versatile artist. Since Christopher Wood's exhibition in 1984 he has become known for his imaginative landscapes, but his contemporary reputation rested on the part he played in the Arts and Crafts movement. He was a prolific designer of stained glass, war memorials and other church furnishings, and ran the Woodlands Press at Shorne, near Gravesend, c.1895-1913. Here he produced books by himself and his wife Adelaide Bloxham, printing them lithographically with hand colouring in a manner indebted to Blake. James Guthrie (1874-1952) worked for him 1897-9, and since their styles have much in common, in terms both of book production and Hallward's landscape paintings, it is interesting to speculate as to who influenced whom. From today's perspective Guthrie seems the dominant artistic personality, but Hallward was sixteen years his senior. Hallward exhibited with the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society and at the Royal Academy, the Grosvenor, the RBA and the NEAC. In the 1880s like so many exponents of the Arts and Crafts, he lived in Hammersmith, but later, after the period at Shorne, he divided his time between Ealing and Pembrokeshire. As a young man he knew Oscar Wilde, and his name may have suggested that of the artist Basil Hallward in The Picture of Dorian Gray.

The present picture, like many of Hallward's later landscapes, was probably inspired by the Pembrokeshire countryside, although it is also typical in being an imaginative, visionary account of its subject. In a lecture entitled Essentials of Art which Hallward gave when an exhibition of his work was held at Dowdeswell's in 1913, he summed up his artistic beliefs by defining art as 'emotion realised in form.'