He worked in large lines, broad surfaces and masses of light or shade.

His colour was good, running to purples, reds, and admirable greens, full of bitumen and raw sienna.
Though he had no idea of composition, he was clever enough to acknowledge it.

His finished pictures were broad reaches of landscape, deserts, shores, and moors in which he placed solitary figures of men or animals in a way that was very effective--as, for instance, a great strip of shore and in the foreground the body of a drowned sailor; a lion drinking in the midst of an immense Sahara; or, one that he called "The Remnant of an Army," a dying war horse wandering on an empty plain, the saddle turned under his belly, his mane and tail snarled with burrs.
Some time before there had come to him the idea for a great picture.

It was to be his first masterpiece, his salon picture when he should get to Paris.

A British cavalryman and his horse, both dying of thirst and wounds, were to be lost on a Soudanese desert, and in the middle distance on a ridge of sand a lion should be drawing in upon them, crouched on his belly, his tail stiff, his lower jaw hanging.