This 'view of buildings and mountains' was produced by Rose while she was living in India with her brother John and while their sister Julia was visiting. The title should read 'On the road between Mussoorie and Shimla' both in the Himalayas. Rose was in India between 1875 and 1879. She stayed maining with her brother John at Dehra Dun (North-West Province) and in Mussoorie (Himalayas) where they would go when the summers got too hot. It is signed by the artist and dated

Rose arrived in India with John's wife, Mary Cornwallis in 1875. Both had gone out to see John, then Captain (later Colonel) in the Royal [Bengal Engineering Corps] Engineers. He was attached to the Government Trigonometrical Survey Office whose headquarters were in Dehra Dun. Mary died in Mussoorie in October 1876. Rose stayed on to look after her brother.

In 1879 John was sent to Calcutta. Rose did not join him but left India, originally to go straight home, but changed her mind at the last minute and travelled to Hong Kong instead to visit another sister, Amelia (8th child, 5th daughter of John and Margaret Herschel) and Amelia's new husband Thomas Wade, British Minister in Peking.

Rose, as she was known to the family, was John and Margaret's 10th child. This is one of a series of drawings she, alongside her brothers and sisters, would have done as part of her artistic education. The Herschel daughters, and the sons before they went away to school, recieved a very intensive education at home with lessons from their mother, their father, a series of governesses and a number of specialist outside tutors. Rose spent much of her adult life in India looking after her brothers William and John and later (in 1885) marrying a friend of her brother's William Waterfield.