Pictorialism was the argument that a photograph could be a picture rather than a record, and it was fought with soft focus, long tonal ranges and printing processes that left the photographer's hand all over the paper. George Chance took that argument to the other side of the world. He had demonstrated cameras in Liverpool and taught photography in London before he sailed for New Zealand in 1909, and he was among the first to bring the pictorialist idea to Dunedin, where he made his living fitting spectacles and his name making photographs.

Trees were his subject more than anything else, and here there are two of them, holding the whole left side of the frame while the loch runs away flat and bright behind. A boat is pulled up on the shingle. Sheep are lying in the grass. Nothing is happening, deliberately.

Almost everything of his that comes up for sale is New Zealand: Taupo, Taihape, Whakatipu, the Otago harbour. This one is Scotland. He signed it on the mount in his own lettering, Geo. Chance F.R.P.S., which was a fellowship he had every right to put there.