Guthrie worked on this large-scale painting between 1885 and 1886. For part of that time he was staying at Cockburnspath, a small village near the Berwickshire coast, but he also worked on it in Glasgow and Kirkcudbright.
The painting’s size was unusual for the time given the everyday subject matter. Large canvases were normally reserved for epic historical or religious themes. It shows a young boy and girl collecting windfall apples
in an orchard as sunlight shimmers through the trees. Guthrie struggled with the challenges posed by working on such a scale; it forced him to use broad brushwork to achieve the naturalistic representation that
he was seeking. The sketchbook that Guthrie used while staying at Cockburnspath is in the Scottish National Gallery’s Print Room, and it reveals his experiments with the composition of this picture.
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