Turner visited the Lake District on a northern tour in 1797. This painting originated in a pencil sketch in his 'Tweed and Lakes' sketchbook of Church Beck Falls and Coppermines Valley.

The painting is largely free of subject or narrative save the landscape itself and the changes wrought by time and weather. It announced a new art of natural history. To highlight its vivid effects of morning light and rising mist, Turner quoted Adam and Eve's dawn hymn to the Creator in Milton's Paradise Lost.