Often known as 'Windsor', even in the schedule of the Turner Bequest; Turner's somewhat perverse title suggests that for him the agricultural activity in the foreground was more interesting than the royal castle that looms through the haze behind. The contrast with the earlier ‘Windsor Castle from the Thames’ at Petworth (No.8) could not be more marked and stresses the revolution in Turner's approach to landscape in the few years that had elapsed.

Turner made innumerable studies at and around Windsor. In the ‘Windsor and Eton' sketchbook there is a small sketch from the same viewpoint and related but not exactly corresponding drawings of cows and figures (T.B.XCVII-2; 22, 87, 89 etc; 27, 81v, 82v, etc; examples repr. Wilkinson 1974, p.82).