Elijah Walton (1832-1880), a Birmingham artist who was ‘the Ansel Adams’ of mountain pictures in his day, pioneering a new approach that was as much about weather as geology, though his geology is said to have been perfectly scientific. Rather amazingly he doesn’t appear to have ever had a proper modern artbook or post-Victorian exhibition. Birmingham Museums have only two on his mountain pictures. But one wonders if he was known to Tolkien, as a fellow Brummie? There’s something of Middle-earth in the pictures, and I’d suggest there may even be scope for his home city to now give him a belated retrospective exhibition, in combination with some ‘Tolkien and mountains’ side-rooms? Perhaps even also a side-room on the early Auden’s fascination with bleak upland landscapes. Auden was also a south Birmingham lad.

Many more are at Elijah Walton Mountain Paintings.