This painting, exhibited at the Scottish Academy in 1849, is one of a series of the harbours of the Forth and the north-east coast of England. Over a century and a half later the view of Edinburgh from across the Firth of Forth is much the same as it was in Crawford's day. In the centre of the painting Edinburgh Castle Rock can be clearly seen, with Salisbury Crags and Arthur's Seat to the left. Part of the Island of Inchcolm with its twelfth-century Augustinian Abbey can be glimpsed on the extreme right. 

Edmund Thornton Crawford RSA, 1806-1885

Born in Cowden, near Dalkeith, Midlothian, Crawford was an apprentice house painter who turned artist. He studied at the Trustees' Academy in Edinburgh at the age of twenty-five he made the first of several visits to The Netherlands. Noted for his marine and landscape paintings, he worked in a style that was strongly influenced by seventeenth-century Dutch art.