A large watercolour showing Queen Victoria and Prince Albert ascending Lochnagar on horseback, on the Balmoral estate, accompanied by the royal children, their governess Miss Bulteel and a number of gillies. Signed and dated bottom left: Carl Haag 1853.

The snaking procession and the sweep of the Queen’s riding habit create a sense of dynamism in this watercolour, while the luminous colouring and unusually large size (the equivalent of many oil paintings) singled it out for particular praise when it went on public display in 1854 at the Old Watercolour Society exhibition. Haag had accompanied the royal party on such an expedition while at Balmoral on 17 September 1853.

Morning in the Highlands was commissioned by Prince Albert from Haag in 1853 as a Christmas present for Queen Victoria. At the same time Haag also worked on this watercolour, which was a commission from the Queen as a present for her spouse for his birthday the following year (see RCIN 451255). The studies Haag made for these works, as well as other Scottish scenes, were probably also acquired by the royal couple, and were originally kept in a portfolio lettered with the title 'Original Studies from Nature in the Highlands'.

Carl Haag was born in Bavaria and visited London in 1847 to learn more about English watercolour painting technique, studying at the Royal Academy Schools the following year and settling in England. On a sketching trip in the Tyrol in 1852 he had a chance encounter with Charles, Prince of Leiningen (Queen Victoria’s half-brother) and Ernest II, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (Prince Albert’s brother), who jointly commissioned Haag to paint them in an Alpine setting as a Christmas present for Queen Victoria (see RCIN 917108). Victoria and Albert, impressed with the double portrait, then invited the artist to their residence in the Scottish Highlands, Balmoral Castle, the following autumn, to paint scenes of their lives there. His association with the British court endured for a time after Albert's death in 1861, and there is a significant corpus of watercolours by him in the Royal Collection (including several Egyptian subjects, as Haag spent two years in Egypt and the Near East in 1858-60 and travelled again to Egypt 1873-4).

Text adapted from Victoria & Albert: Art & Love, London, 2010