The attribution of this watercolour has been doubted and indeed Davis appears to have spent much of his time in the early 1830s abroad. In July 1830 he was in Paris working on a series of watercolours for Lord Farnborough, and he remained there until the following year. In the summer of 1832 he returned to England for his marriage to Elizabeth Abbott, but he was back on the continent by October. In 1833 and 1834 he was in Belgium and Italy, and his visits to England were brief. His next prolonged stay in England was not until 1835, when he returned for the birth of his daughter, Betsy (see G. Watkin Williams, The Life and Works of John Scarlett Davis, The Old Water-Colour Society's Club, vol. XLV, 1970, pp.18-21). However, the quality of the work is high and there seems to be no reason to doubt the authenticity of the signature, which clearly resembles the 'J Scarlett Davis 1835' on Davis's Library at Tottenham, The Seat of B.G. Windus, Esq., now in the British Museum (repr. in colour L. Stainton, British Landscape Watercolours in the British Museum 1600-1860, 1985, pl.118).
At the time of the 1985 sale the scene, previously called 'The Avon Gorge above Bristol', was identified as a view of the River Wye with Chepstow Castle in the distance seen from the Eagle's Nest at the top of Wyndcliff