By the close of the eighteenth century, taste for the Picturesque was giving way to a more emotional response to nature and landscape, associated with the Romantic concept of the Sublime. This favoured grander, awe-inspiring scenes and the feelings and passions associated with them.

Perhaps because he was used to the gentler landscape of East Anglia, the Norwich artist John Crome responded to the bleakness of the Cumbrian mountains in this picture, which derived from visits in 1802 or 1806. Crome's fellow East Anglian, John Constable, commented after touring the region that 'the solitude of mountains oppressed his spirits'.