Recto: a watercolour showing a view of Lochnagar, a loch in the corrie of the mountain near the Balmoral Estate. Verso: inscribed with the title, artist's name and '22 September', the date of the Queen's expedition to this loch (1849).

In 1848 Prince Albert took a twenty-seven year lease on the Balmoral Estate, having been shown watercolour views of the property by the Aberdeen artist James Giles. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert first stayed at the estate that September and were probably introduced to Giles at that time. A year later they returned, and the royal party visited Lochnagar for the first time on 22 September 1849 (Lochnagar is the name of both the mountain and the loch below the summit). The Queen described it three days later, in a letter to her uncle Leopold, King of the Belgians, as 'one of the wildest, grandest things imaginable; the Expedition took us 7 hours; the Lake is about 1000 feet below the highest point. - & Albert thinks it very like the Crater of Mount Vesuvius.'

On 28 September Queen Victoria commissioned Giles to paint three specific views of lochs on the estate: Lochnagar, Dubh Loch and Loch Muick. Giles arrived at Balmoral on 1 October and went up to the lochs on the following days. It was bitterly cold, with snow and sleet, and ice on the pools; further, Victoria had chosen steep vantage points and Giles was unable to sketch properly, even losing one of his notebooks. He left Balmoral in a black humour and did not begin to work up his studies into finished watercolours until a month later. During this time Giles managed to suppress the memory of his discomforts, and he depicted the lochs in gentle sunlight. The faint mist before the distant shadowed cliffs was captured by gently abrading the surface of the paper; the sparse foreground vegetation is less successfully drawn, and betrays the separation of the studio-bound artist from the motif.

Signed lower left J. Giles

Catalogue entry from Royal Treasures, A Golden Jubilee Celebration, London 2002