Lambert depicted this view of rugged wooded country from the north side of the Grose Valley in the Blue Mountains, New South Wales. He painted the scene from high ground, including a wooded copse in the foreground sloping to hills in the distance. He created a harmonious balance of browns, pinks and purples, blues and greens, all within a close tonal range. He emphasised the pattern of the hills rising up from the valley, highlighting their undulating forms.

Responding directly to nature, Lambert depicted what was in front of him, but simplified the scene with an emphasis on the underlying sense of pattern and rhythmical structure. He captured the largeness of space and the hazy light of the area.

Lambert visited Leura in the Blue Mountains in April 1928 and again in November 1928, and would have painted this view directly in front of the motif. He demonstrated an interest in reducing a landscape to its basic design.

Basil Burdett responded to this work when it was exhibited in Lambert’s memorial exhibition and wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald on 24 September 1930 that Mountain landscape achieved ‘a great effect in the faint glow over the distant hills’, and suggested in Art in Australia , October–November 1930, that the painting was of great interest in its preservation of form and that ‘as an object lesson in direct landscape painting, it was of first importance’.