Lamb first visited Donegal in 1912, and returned the following year. During his time in Ireland he made numerous pochades—small outdoor studies of the landscape on panel. The weather hampered his efforts, however. It was ‘hopelessly bad’, he wrote, and the poor light ‘makes it almost impossible to invent good colours.’ Lamb's biographer Keith Clements wrote: 'these "paysages sketches", as he called them, are modest and not unpleasing; but they reveal little of the richness of the countryside and, much as he responded physically and emotionally to the Irish landscape and admired the spatial, bracing qualities of the open air, none matches his feelings nor conveys a sense of place.' (Clements 1985, p. 116)