Lower Rydal Waterfall

The waterfall was – and is – a well-known landmark near Grasmere in the Lake District. The region, which had previously been considered wild and inhospitable, was by the late eighteenth century beginning to attract visitors making fashionable tours in search of picturesque scenery. Ibbetson noted on the back of this painting that it was ‘drawn from nature’. It was made for Thomas Vernon, a Liverpool dealer to whom the artist had contracted all his work for six months, and whose hard bargaining he described in a bitterly ironic description now preserved on the frame.