Unlike John Ruskin, who famously urged artists to 'go to Nature' so that they might faithfully record their surroundings, Regrave explained in an 1868 lecture to the Associated Arts Institute that his own landscapes were more poetic than they were necessarily accurate: when depicting nature, Redgrave felt that 'the painter must treasure up the incident or feeling that awoke this sense of pleasure in the scene - and must reproduce it on canvas - an act of memory.... Nay, the most poetical phases of landscape are of all the most fleeting.'