One of the founder members of the Royal Scottish Academy, Robert Scott Lauder left his native Edinburgh to study painting abroad, first in Italy and then in Munich. He moved to London upon his return, and several years later in 1847 submitted two large pictures of Christ to the Westminster Hall competition. In one, Christ walks on a sea of glassy waves reflecting the sun's white light, the clouds building up towards the heavens. The sea in our picture — painted in the same year — is very similar, but calmer, and tinged with a quiet, placid silvery grey. When it was exhibited at the RSA in 1848, one reviewer admired the 'poetical conceit' of the figures 'sailing on the bosom of an unruffled sea. The morning sun is playing cheerfully on the water, and colours with a rich, though chaste, warmth the drapery of the female, and the rich brown of her marine car' (Birmingham Journal). By 1872, the picture belonged to Henry Bicknell, son of Elhanan Bicknell, who owned one of the greatest collections of Turner paintings in the country.