Landscape with Tourists at Loch Katrine

Painted sometime around 1815–20, Knox’s view of Loch Katrine is unusual in placing modern tourists admiring a Highland landscape so explicitly centre stage. Accompanied by a bagpiper, hired for the day, his tourists are bound for ‘Ellen’s Isle’, the setting of The Lady of the Lake’s opening cantos. Indeed, like Scott’s protagonist James Fitz-James, diverted from his stag hunt by the charms of the ‘Lady of the Lake’, the two young men and their female companion might be seen as acting out their own version of the tale.