In 1848 Prince Albert took a 27-year lease on (and later bought) the Balmoral estate from the 4th Earl of Aberdeen, having been shown watercolour views of the property by Aberdeen’s protégé James Giles. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert first stayed at the estate that September, and they were probably introduced to Giles on that occasion, for the Queen commissioned two oil paintings from him, distant views of the Castle and of Lochnagar, the highest mountain on the estate, as Christmas presents for Albert. A year later they returned, and on 22 September 1849 the royal party made their first expedition up Lochnagar. Queen Victoria 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 [300 m] below the highest point. - & Albert thinks it very like the Crater of Mount Vesuvius’.

On 28 September 1849 the Queen commissioned Giles to paint three watercolours of specific views of lochs on the estate, Loch Muick, Dubh Loch, and Lochnagar (which is also the name of the tarn below the summit of the mountain). 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 the Queen had chosen difficult vantage points. Giles was unable to sketch properly, even losing one of his notebooks, and he left Balmoral in a black humour. He sent his watercolours to the Queen by the end of November, but he recorded in his diary on 19 December that the Queen was ‘not pleased with something ... so much for dictating to a professional man ... had I been left alone they would have been very different’.

Evidently Giles was asked to rework at least one of his watercolours. Whereas the view of Dubh Loch is dated 1849, that of Loch Muick is dated 1850, and the Royal Library holds two views of Lochnagar, one undated and this sheet dated 2 July 1850. The undated view shows the loch in gentle sunlight; perhaps the Queen was not sufficiently impressed by the sublimity of Giles’s rendering, for this more broadly painted second version shows the corrie of the mountain in cold shadow, a foreground of grey boulders, and rain blowing in from the left.

Inscribed by the artist, lower left Loch in the / corry of Lochnagar / JGiles July 2. 1850

Text adapted from Victoria & Albert: Art & Love, London, 2010