This painting is part of a series combining views of the New Zealand landscapes taken from historical painters with the idea of a colonial sampler. In this case, the historical artist is John Buchanan (1819-98), a botanist and topographical draughtsman, born in Scotland, who arrived in New Zealand in 1848. He completed a geological survey of Otago for the provincial government in 1862. During his journeys through Otago he painted landscapes, one of which, Milford Sound, Looking North West from Freshwater Basin (1863) is regarded as one of the finest early New Zealand landscape paintings and is held in the Hocken Collections. Ireland has described his work as being "concerned with the traffic between historical, cultural, social and personal within Aotearoa/New Zealand.