John Ruskin took his boyhood watercolour lessons from Copley Fielding, and recalled the experience vividly enough, decades later in his autobiography Praeterita, to describe precisely how his teacher taught him "to wash colour smoothly in successive tints, to shade cobalt through pink madder into yellow ochre for skies... and to crumble burnt umber with a dry brush for the foliage and foreground." Fielding's own name, combining those of Anthony van Dyck and the history painter John Singleton Copley, reflected the ambitions his father, the portrait and landscape painter Nathan Theodore Fielding, held for him from birth; born in Sowerby, near Halifax, in 1787, he was the third and by far the most successful of five brothers who all pursued careers in art.
Trained first by his father and then, from around 1809, by the influential watercolourist John Varley in London, whose pupils also included William Turner of Oxford, Fielding rose quickly through the ranks of the Old Water-Colour Society, becoming an associate in 1810, a full member by 1811 or 1813, and its president from 1831 until his death, a position he held longer than any other artist in the Society's history. He was extraordinarily prolific, sometimes sending forty or fifty watercolours to the Society's annual exhibition in a single year, and won a gold medal at the 1824 Paris Salon alongside John Constable and Richard Parkes Bonington. Ruskin, who remained a lifelong champion, praised Fielding's treatment of moving water in memorable terms, and his atmospheric renderings of coastal shipping, rain, mist and cloud, worked in the flat, transparent washes characteristic of Romantic watercolour practice, made him hugely popular with collectors, though many of his watercolours have since faded owing to his use of indigo pigment. He also taught extensively and profitably throughout his career, eventually settling in Worthing, where he died in 1855.
The painting by Fielding held by John Mitchell Fine Paintings, a view near Clappersgate close to Ambleside in the Lake District, exemplifies the atmospheric British landscape watercolours for which he was celebrated in his own lifetime and remains admired today, and connects within the gallery's collection to William Callow, another watercolourist trained in the circle around John Varley.