Craigdarroch Water, Moniaive

Paterson was one of a group of painters known as the Glasgow Boys. Most of them studied in Paris and they brought to Scotland a distinctive style, based on painting in the open air. They preferred the soft colours of a grey, overcast light to bright sun, and they recorded broad tonal values rather than detail or narrative. Their work often displays an elegant, decorative sense of composition seen here in the spare and stylised tree trunks. Paterson settiled in Moniaive, Dumfriesshire in 1884 and this is one of his many views of the area.