This large early 20th-century oil painting by English artist John Falconar Slater (1857-1937) depicts a picturesque river landscape with a town and distant hills. Slater was an accomplished, Royal Academy exhibited, painter of landscapes, seascapes and scenes.Under a glowering sky, which dominates the composition, a silvery river snakes between its banks towards a distant row of buildings, rendered in grey. While on the right, a diminutive figure stands before the edge of a town, adjacent to a building resembling a methodist church.Born in Newcastle upon Tyne, Slater’s route into art was a rather unconventional one but, despite this, he became one of the foremost British impressionists of his generation. His early years were spent in gainful employment as a bookkeeper for his father’s milling business. But before long, he sought independence and riches by travelling to the lucrative diamond fields of South Africa. Here, he might’ve conceivably stayed but, following a fierce sto...