Peter Doig spent much of his childhood in Canada and lived there between 1960 and 1979. Paintings such as Figure in Mountain Landscape are indebted to his formative exposure to landscapes of snow and evergreen forests. The artist made several paintings of this title, which was apparently lifted from a painting by Francis Bacon (1956, Kunsthaus Zürich). The series included two large-format canvases, and it demonstrated a mood of confidence which coincided with growing public recognition for Doig’s work. He was forty-nine at the time of his first museum retrospective held in 1998, Peter Doig: Blizzard seventy-seven, which toured Kunsthalle zu Kiel, Kunsthalle Nürnberg and Whitechapel Art Gallery. As the foreword to the exhibition catalogue acknowledged, Doig was considered at the time to be ‘one of Britain’s most prominent and exciting young artists’. The inscription on the reverse of the painting shows that Figure in Mountain Landscape was painted during a summer residency in Vienna, which occurred in 1999. Several other works painted in Vienna are similarly inscribed, such as a small painting on canvas called The Painter’s Lake and a watercolour called House with Gate Posts.

This painting of Figure in Mountain Landscape was made on unprimed linen. This highly absorbent support produced fine-grained textures in the landscape around the figure, which were painted using translucent oil paint thinned with turpentine. In places the paint was so liquid that it ran in channels before sinking into the linen, a distinctive visual effect common to other paintings by Doig at this stage in his career. The mountains, lake and sky resound with bright, saturated, chromatic colours of turquoise, blue, pink and purple, and the loose, liquid handling of paint suggests effects of light and atmosphere. Despite the insistent mediation of materials, the pictorial content of Doig’s painting is faithful to the spirit of the subject. The foreground is filled with diagonal slashes of black and purple, and these convey a sense of undergrowth which is more obvious in other versions of the picture. The figure is treated in stark contrast to the surrounding landscape. The calico effect in puce and ochre paint is distributed in an unexpected pattern, which flattens and distorts the body of the figure. These contrastingly dark, opaque colours produce a vivid, shapely silhouette against the luminous landscape, which spreads out in a panorama beyond. Floating between the artist and the landscape, his picture is painted with opaque, richly brushed impasto: a flattened area of white is the brightest point in the picture, and this is punctuated by fine daubs of lilac and red paint, which bear no obvious likeness to the landscape the artist gazes upon.

The composition of Figure in Mountain Landscape derives from a photograph taken by Joachim Gautier, which shows the Canadian Group of Seven painter Franklin Carmichael working from life at Grace Lake, Ontario, in 1934. But Doig deviates from and distorts his source image. For example, two uneven verticals beneath the figure in Doig’s painting suggest the prongs of a stool, while the photograph shows Carmichael seated on a boulder. In a description of his Figure in Mountain Landscape paintings, Doig made clear the self-consciously self-referential aspect of depicting a painter at work:

"It is a mountain landscape and the figure is painting a painting, but he is becoming part of the landscape that is being painted. The whole thing becomes a painting, rather than a painting depicting a painter. I think the forms hover in reality."

The relationship between the poet-painter and the landscape mimics the imagery of Romantic art, notably Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818, Hamburger Kunsthalle), in which an encounter with Nature is dramatised by the modesty of the figure and the epic grandeur of the setting. The imagery of a painter working plein air and direct from Nature might be self-consciously ironic, since Doig himself is a studio painter who works exclusively from found imagery. The insistent material qualities of his painting point to the activity of reconstruction and mediation, which for Doig is made possible by separating himself from his subject. Doig admires Canadian Post-Impressionist painting of the kind practised by Franklin Carmichael, and his painting can also be interpreted as a commentary upon Group of Seven paintings: although they were often studied from life, the distortions and patterning used by those artists constitute a productive and intriguing divergence from naturalistic appearances. Paintings such as Figure in Mountain Landscape draw attention to this divergence.

Doig made several versions of Figure in Mountain Landscape between 1996 and 1999, including an etching that formed part of his ten-part portfolio Grasshopper (1997). Besides the etching, all Doig’s treatments of the subject reverse the photographic image; this suggests they were traced or projected from the source image. He painted it on a large scale in two works. The first was made in 1997–98 and adopted a vertical format; the other, painted in 1998 and purchased the following year by Philadelphia Museum of Art, was even larger and used a landscape format. He continued to repeat this image after these versions were complete, as shown by this and two other paintings made in 1999. These later versions of the subject were evidently not preparations for the large paintings, and Doig’s motive for repeating the image are not recorded. It is not publicly recorded how many times Doig painted Figure in Mountain Landscape, but as of February 2026, the auction rooms had sold four oil paintings on paper (one of which was subsequently acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York), two paintings on canvas, and one gouache. With each version Doig adopted a different palette, a different crop and in one case a different, cave-like setting for the figure. The variety of the series demonstrates Doig’s inventive powers and suggests a self-conscious desire to explore the subject in contrasting styles.

In part owing to Doig’s repetition of the subject, the crouched figure studying a mountain landscape has become one of the more famous images in his oeuvre. The first large-scale version of Figure in Mountain Landscape was first shown in Doig’s 1998 retrospective (no. 29), and again in a touring retrospective of 2008/09. The other large-scale version of Figure in Mountain Landscape, painted in 1998, was exhibited in Doig’s touring retrospective in 2015. Both were shown at Kunsthaus Glarus in 1999, along with a smaller painted version and two proofs of the print from the Grasshopper portfolio. These inclusions suggest not only the importance of these paintings in particular, but also the significance of the imagery they represent. The first large version of Figure in Mountain Landscape was also one of fifty paintings that the poet Derek Walcott responded to in his collection Morning, Paramin:

To have him in my house, or rather, in
the studio and its annex, was flattering, although
to coin his profile in the slowly gathering
clouds at sunset over the pool—no!
That sort of biography was not his style.
He made a ceremony of simplicity
and stillness as his mirrored craft keeps still
his woods with the last words of falling snow.
Drawing is a sort of duplicity,
he joins them, the pouis and gommier’s avalanche,
after the crisp, fierce snow’s ferocity
has left her tattered fabric on a branch,
as foam or snowfall whiten from one brush
the double climate that he keeps inside
the landscapes that astound him with their ambush.

The poem for Figure in Mountain Landscape draws attention to the layers contained within Doig’s imagery. By referring to the artist’s ‘mirrored craft’, it is suggested that a picture consists of both the made object itself and the worlds it reflects. A similar idea is suggested by the description of drawing as ‘a sort of duplicity’: duplicity in the sense of a doubling, where the marks of the drawing are both themselves and the thing they represent, or even representations of several different things at once. Walcott wrote the poems in 2015 when Doig had lived on Trinidad for over a decade, and he retrospectively perceived in Doig’s pre-Trinidad snow paintings a luxuriant Caribbean fusion. Evincing two trees common in the Caribbean, his description of ‘the pouis and gommier’s avalanche’ poignantly fuses together suggestions of snowfall and fragrant blossom. In short, Walcott believed that Figure in Mountain Landscape, along with Doig’s other snow paintings, were an expression of ‘the double climate’ that Doig incubated within his creative imagination: tropical heat and snowy wastes. Walcott further suggested that this fusion came as a surprise to the artist; the ‘double climate’ is said to ‘ambush’ him.

At the turn of the millennium, Doig’s paintings were widely perceived to show fabulous poetic or imperfectly remembered images. In 1998, Denise Robinson claimed that his paintings present a ground ‘thick with the psychic debris that cinema endlessly produces’, and in the same catalogue Ian Hunt thought Doig’s paintings were ‘like somebody else’s memory or dream that a film crew has been persuaded to construct, which has now become a made, shared thing out there to be encountered.’ In the catalogue note for his exhibition at Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, in 2000, John Hutchinson described another painting of Figure in Mountain Landscape in these terms:

"Dreamlike, almost hallucinatory, a hooded artist hunches over a sketch, perched on a hill overlooking a bay and mountains. Dark, disembodied, the figure is on the point of decomposing into the curiously mottled landscape."

The same year, Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson gave a broad description of Doig’s paintings as being ‘filled with mystery’, ‘icons of autobiography filtered through an acute perception’. She went on to discuss the Figure in Mountain Landscape as ‘a self-portrait of the artist—perhaps more of a conceptual or psychological self-portrait rather than an actual one.’ In 2000, for the assistant curator of contemporary art at Saint Louis Art Museum, Rochelle Steiner, Doig ‘returned to images again and again the way one might have a recurring dream: each time it appears a bit differently but nevertheless with strong iconic consistency.’ In 2008, the curator Judith Nesbitt adopted a similar interpretation of the large Figure in Mountain Landscape, which was included in Tate Britain’s Doig retrospective: ‘Doig positions the viewer just behind the peculiarly hooded artist perched on a mountain top, so that we view the plein-air painting as well as the view itself—scale and vantage point pulling the viewer into the hallucinogenic vision.’