View of Place Fell and Hellvellyn, Ullswater, from Gowbarrow Park

Glover was fascinated by the extensive beauty of Ullswater, exhibiting a watercolour of the area nearly every year at the Old Watercolour Society from 1806-1816, as well as executing numerous oils from different vantage points. This view is taken from a vantage point just below Lyulph's Tower looking across Ullswater all the way to where the artist himself lived on a farm in the 1820s. To the left is Place Fell, with Silverpoint stretching into the centre of the lake, and Hellvellyn to the right. In the foreground, the very edge of Gowbarrow Park is visible. Glover's house, previously owned by Wordsworth, is situated to the left of this view, just behind Place Fell, near Patterdale, and was his home some time between 1818 and 1824 until he reputedly sold it for ¨£1,100 in order to buy a painting by Claude Lorrain (Basil S. Long, 'John Glover', Walker's Quarterly, 1924, p.17).

It was during this period that Glover staged a series of one-man shows, placing his work among paintings by Claude Lorrain and Richard Wilson, together with his own copies of 17th-century landscapes. In 1824 he became a founder-member of the Society of British Artists, and he exhibited there regularly until 1829, when he chose to emigrate to Australia, realising £60,000 from the sale of his house and paintings. Glover settled in Tasmania at Mill’s Plains on the Nile River, where he remained until his death, and became one of the most important colonial landscape painters in Australia.