This interesting collection of watercolours are by Anna Julia Grant-Duff (née Webster) (1839–1915). The pictures tell of Anna's wide-ranging travels in the second half of the 19th century, picturing Scotland, France, Switzerland, Algeria, Egypt and Palestine. Women at this time are all too often remembered and defined by the men in their lives: and indeed it was her marriage in 1859 to Sir Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant-Duff (1829–1906) that provided her with the opportunity to travel so widely and encounter many interesting literary and political figures. Mountstuart Grant-Duff was a well-connected Scottish politician, administrator and author, who served as Governor of Madras from 1881 to 1886. He travelled extensively and wrote voluminously. But Anna also had her own talents and interests, and in Madras she was instrumental in setting up the pioneering Royal Victoria Hospital for Caste and Gosha Women in 1884, an exclusive hospital for women, under the superintendence of Mary Ann Scharlieb—the first lady doctor who qualified from the University of London. Anna also helped Florence Nightingale find suitable authors to write health primers in vernacular languages, and she herself published 'Speeches 1884-5-6' on women's health in India, which Nightingale described as 'the very best I ever read by a woman'. Anna also published a volume of poetry in 1882.

Anna Grant-Duff documents the couple's extensive travels in watercolour. In 1870 there is record of her meeting with the woman artist Elizabeth Butler (1846–1933), who travelled to the far reaches of the Empire—including Palestine—with her husband, William Francis Butler, a distinguished officer of the British Army. It is possible that Grant-Duff found inspiration in Elizabeth Butler.

Anna Grant-Duff was also fortunate that during her travels she associated with many interesting figures. In Brittany, on their trip to the prehistoric site at Carnac in 1876, the Grant-Duffs were accompanied by John Lubbock, the banker and polymath who made significant contributions in archaeology, ethnography and biology, and coined the terms 'Paleolithic' and 'Neolithic'. The following year they were also accompanied by Lubbock on their trip to Algeria. At Algiers they met with the Consul-General of Algeria, Robert Lambert Playfair, and Lubbock even bought a house in the French part of the city. Mountstuart Grant-Duff writes of their experience in Algeria: 'Already… on the way from the shore to our hotel, we saw more costumes and more contrasts of colour than we had done in the whole of Spain…' Travelling on to the capital, they remained in the city for a fortnight, 'getting fonder of Algiers with every hour we passed in it.'

In the 1880s the Grant-Duffs spent a winter at Haifa in a house owned by the British author and traveller Laurence Oliphant (1829–1888). Oliphant and his wife Alice were Christian Zionists, who instigated a mission to establish a Jewish agricultural settlement in Palestine. The Oliphants settled in Palestine in the early 1880s, dividing their time between a house in the German Colony in Haifa, and another in the Druze village of Daliyat al-Karmel on Mount Carmel. Anna Grant-Duff's Palestinian watercolours focus on the landscapes in this area and are an interesting record of Palestine in the late 19th century.

Grant-Duff's UK subjects include Ealing, where she was born, and Eden in Aberdeenshire, the home of her husband, as well as views at their family home, Hampden House, on the Chiltern Hills, where they entertained many illustrious visitors. An amusing diary entry written by Mountstuart Grant-Duff in 1874 reflects on the extent of their foreign travels, whilst also reminding us how slow and immersive that travel must have been: 'How we do flit about the world now-a-days!... Still, all this will be, within a generation, considered quite slow work, if C[avour] is right… after listening for some time to his views about flying machines, I said, "Do I really understand you correctly when I understand you to say that within twenty years you think we shall go to New York in a day?" and that he answered, "I don't see how it can be otherwise." Such a statement, coming from a man of his great scientific position, donne à penser.'