Like many artists of his age (he attended the RA schools in the early 1850s) Storey admired the Pre-Raphaelites and, in its colour and scope, this little watercolour shows the powerful influence of one of that set, Ford Madox Brown, whose painting An English Autumn Afternoon, Hampstead - Scenery in 1853, had been exhibited in 1855, with a similar high viewpoint to the peripheries of normal vision without turning the head. Ruskin, when he first met Brown, asked him what had made him paint ‘such a very ugly subject’, to which Brown replied: ’Because it lay out of a back window.’ Storey would certainly have seen Brown’s picture. In 1858, Storey was living in Marlborough Place, St. John’s Wood, right on the edge of built-up London as it was the. To the north towards Hampstead it was still countryside, like Brown’s view, and it is possible that this picture was the view from Storey’s house.