Caledonia, Stern and Wild
The title of this painting is taken from canto VI of the poem by Sir Walter Scott Lay of the last minstrel (1806). It is indicative of the artist’s interests and the subject matter: Scottish glens and Highland cattle.
Despite their subject, most of his paintings were executed in his studio in Darley Dale, Derbyshire where he kept Highland cattle. He was visited here by Merton and Annie Russell-Cotes. Merton wrote in his autobiography ‘Among all my artistic friends, I esteem none more than my old friend Louis B. Hurt, for whom, and his charming wife, I have the deepest affection’.
In the 1918 publication The Russell Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, Bournemouth, art criticisms by R. J. Cruickshank, it is also called The White North. The article states that this artwork was commissioned by Merton from the artist. It was a particularly popular work by Hurt, this one being the first of three versions he made.
Hurt was born in Derbyshire and studied art in London under the landscape artist George Turner (1843-1910). He was influenced by the animal paintings of Sir Edwin Landseer and the Scottish landscapes of Peter Graham (1836-1921), to whom his work is often compared.
