John Downton was a painter, poet and musician. He attended the Royal Drawing School at a young age and studied first English then History of Art at Cambridge. He later enrolled at the Slade to study painting. Working in egg tempera, the medium used by the early Italian Renaissance masters he admired, gave his paintings a luminosity and translucence. This technique, using egg yolk to bind pure pigments, had been revived by the Birmingham Group in the late 19th – early 20th century in the wake of Arts and Crafts movement, although by the mid-20th century it was rather unfashionable.
 
This is one of five paintings, spanning Downton’s career, presented to the Royal Collection by the John Downton Trust; they encompass portraiture, religious and naïve painting (RCINs 407243, 407478, 407479, 407480, 407481). Three Girls in a Forest and The Travellers probably date from the 1970s and form part of the artist’s later period when his works were naïve, colourful and on a small scale. Here, five stylized full-length male figures (two on horseback) in medieval-style dress move from the left to approach a sixth figure facing them; against a façade of a medieval town with a crenelated wall; a white bird (possibly a dove) stands on the lower left. Downton is no longer making clear references to early Italian Renaissance art he admired but paintings may allude to mythical or biblical subject matter filtered through his own unique vision.