Adrian Stokes, ‘a sensitive and glowing colourist’ (C Lewis Hind), came to live in St Ives in Cornwall in 1886 at the invitation of Stanhope Forbes, a founder of the artist’s colony there. Stokes and his painter wife Marianne had spent time in France, at Fontainebleau, where he met the Barbizon painters, and at Pont-Aven, where, through his wife, he became a firm friend of the Danish artist Peder Severin Krøyer. He was given early advice from Whistler: ‘the first moment is the artist’s moment’, and accordingly thereafter worked quickly and directly from nature. The Stokeses travelled widely in Europe, and often returned to the South Tyrol, where this sweeping view of the Rosengarten peaks in the Dolomites was painted. Stokes exhibited the picture at the 1925 Royal Academy, where a critic wrote that he was ‘well represented by subjects from Switzerland, North Italy or Central Europe’, showing ‘some vivid or strangely beautiful special aspect of Nature’.