The large watercolour shows an artist sitting on a tree stump in Leigh Woods, the setting of many of the Bristol School's landscapes, his eyes firmly fixed on a view while he sketches left-handedly. A younger man is lying on the ground reading, with a palette and brushes put down nearby and an open artist's box containing a landscape sketch inside the lid. Two women and two younger girls, one playing a guitar, have joined the men. Sunlight filters gently through the canopy highlighting the towering rocks which form the backdrop of this quiet scene.

From the 1820s Bristol School artists crossed the river Avon by ferry to sketch in the woods, and also to picnic, converse and play music. The Rev. John Eagles later called Leigh Woods his 'land of poetry and enchantment' (The Sketcher, 1856, p.188). The area was admired for its steep wooded slopes, rocky outcrops and open glades. Since the late 18th century the grandeur of the Gorge had inspired radical Romantic poets such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge who had immortalized the Avon Gorge and its surroundings in his Monody on the Death of Chatterton*, but Leigh Woods also attracted those searching for an Arcadian idyll typical of an older tradition of British pastoral art and poetry.

The identities of the figures in this watercolour shown are not yet determined. Before its acquisition by Bristol Museum & Art Gallery the work was believed to be by William Muller and show his family, which would make the younger man his brother, Edmund Gustavus Muller, who was also an artist. Now identified through the signature in the lower left as a work by Samuel Jackson, the image may be identified as a self-portrait with his wife, Jane Jackson (nee Phillips), and friends.

The artist clearly had a deep personal knowledge of the setting. In 2018, Bristol Museum & Art Gallery acquired a watercolour study by Jackson of the distinct rock formation which can be seen in the top centre of this scene (K6500).

*Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Monody on the Death of Chatterton, 1857.

[From: 'Absolutely Bizarre! Strange Tales from the Bristol School of Artists (1800-1840)', catalogue of an exhibition held at the Museum of Fine Arts, Bordeaux, June 10 to October 17, 2021.]