This is a sketch for a large painting completed twenty years later and recorded in a print. In her Journal (19 September 1850), Queen Victoria wrote: the picture is intended to represent me as meeting Albert, who has been stalking, whilst I have been fishing, and the whole is quite consonant with the truth. The solitude, the sport, and the Highlanders in the water &c. will be, as Landseer says, a beautiful historical exemplification of peaceful times, & of the independent life we lead in the dear Highlands. In his formal and solemn composition Landseer has transformed a day’s sport into a Renaissance altarpiece.