In this comparatively late work, the artist, turning his back on the Morland and Wheatley tradition to which he had adhered earlier, adopts a naturalistic approach in keeping with Victorian sensibility in general and perhaps reflecting in particular the advent of Pre-Raphaelitism. (The P.R.B had been launched in 1848.) The Art Journal, reviewing the Royal Academy of 1851, stressed the picture's truth to nature, 'This is certainly the most successful of the recent productions of the artist. It is an uncompromising study of a section of sylvan scenery, worked out with an unswerving devotion to truth. The foreground, with its thin patches of herbage graduated to a positive grass bottom with abundant and well defined weeds, has every appearance of a rigid translation from nature. The trees have not been selected for picturesque form, but they are painted as they stood, and so perfect is the shaded depth realised, that it seems possible to walk round each of them.