James Townshend learned to paint in Paris, in the studios of William Bouguereau and Carolus-Duran, the man who taught Sargent. He went home and painted English weather.

The Royal Society of British Artists elected him in 1897. He has signed this one RBA, which dates it to after that. He exhibited at the Royal Academy and with the oil and watercolour institutes, and four of his pictures sit in British public collections. The one at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter is called Near Picardy, Late Summer, and it is birches beside still water, much like this.

The title here is pencilled on the backing paper. Silver Birches, Burnham Beeches. Burnham Beeches is nine hundred and twenty six acres of ancient pollarded beech in Buckinghamshire. It came up at auction in 1879 and failed to sell, so Sir Henry Peek bought it at the reserve and sold three hundred and seventy four acres on to the City of London Corporation, who paid for them out of the duties charged on grain landed at the Port of London, so that people living in the smoke would have somewhere to go. A wood famous for its beeches, and what got painted was the birches.

It reached Australia somehow, and in June 1991 it went into Colac Picture Framers at Elliminyt in western Victoria. Lois White framed it with acid free hinging, Alphamat boards and acid free backing, and wrote on her own certificate that she was framing it with foxing damage. Her labels are still on the back with the date. The frame is hers, not ours.