A watercolour view of the mountains in the rain with woods and a rocky foreground. Curved top corners.

This work is a study for a large watercolour known as Morning in the Highlands, commissioned by Prince Albert from Haag in 1853 as a Christmas present for Queen Victoria (see RCIN 451257). At the same time he also worked on a commission from the Queen as a present for her spouse (see RCIN 451255). The studies he 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 (when this watercolour study was made). 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).