'One of the best pictures in the exhibition is Floating by Robert McGregor. It is painted in a light silvery scheme of colour depicting a trio of Dutch peasants in a boat laden with produce.' (The Studio, An Illustrated Magazine of Fine & Applied Art, 1896, Vol. VII, p. 175) Although the reviewer for the Studio identified the women as Dutch peasants, the titles of many of McGregor's paintings suggest that his subjects were of French fisher-women. Floating appears to depict the same family that McGregor painted in Kelp Gatherers (FIG 1. sold in these rooms, 30 August 2000, lot 1249) which may be the picture entitled Fuel Gatherers exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy in the same exhibition as the present picture.

Robert McGregor was born in Bradford in 1847, the son of a Dunfermline businessman who had briefly resided in Yorkshire. The McGregor family returned to Scotland whilst Robert was still a young boy and settled in Edinburgh. Despite received no art training McGregor was employed by a firm of publishers named Nelson, as a book illustrator and it was around this time that an unknown French artist gave him lessons in painting and draughtsmanship. He subsequently enrolled at the Royal Scottish Academy Life schools and exhibited for the first time in 1873 when he was only twenty-six. He continued to exhibit at the RSA until 1914 and showed a total of two hundred and three pictures there. Although he did not train formally in Europe his style was based upon contemporary French and Dutch art, particularly Bastien Lepage, Israels and Millet. He was much influenced by his frequent visits to France and Holland and particularly favoured Normandy and what he saw as the picturesque industries of the fishermen and their families, particularly the female workers toiling on the beaches mending nets, collecting kelp and cockles or shrimping in the shallows. The eminent Scottish art historian James Caw wrote of McGregor as; 'Perhaps the first Scottish genre painter to apply rigorous study of tone in his work; a capable draughtsman and pleasant, if restricted, colourist, and, although he has learned much from some of his modern Dutchmen, his pictures have an individuality and sentiment of their own.'

Peter McEwan praised McGregor's use of subdued, refined colour in his Dictionary of Scottish Artists; 'At the beginning he was most interested in tone but instead of combining it with full local colour, he preferred quiet values and the gentler, more subtle light of the Dutch coast.' McGregor's reflection of grey, damp skies and clothing faded by salt-water is sombre without being depressing whilst the gentle sentiment, the hallmark of his best works, is not cloying or saccharine.