[1] The painting depicts Gwendoline ‘Dee’ Ryrie, the "squatter's daughter" wearing a white shirt and jodhpurs standing by her horse in her family's farming property at Michelago, in New South Wales, Australia.

[1] [Lambert] simplified the triangular mass of the hill and sharpened its outline and counterbalanced this with the strong verticals of the trees and the horizontal streak of green grass in the lower centre.

Lambert painted with tight controlled brush strokes, so that the image seems still, but lifelike, with the trees and grass delineated by a sharp, scintillating lightLambert described his portrayal of Ryrie as "like a figure on a Greek vase" passing "gracefully across the foreground".

Such a break with suave sentiment and surface drawing met with a protective opposition – here was almost an attack upon established income.

Another critic commented: "The Lambert landscape, The Squatter’s Daughter, will be of unique interest … as representing a direct break with the Streeton convention" while Hans Heysen remarked that the painting was "different from anything else painted in Australia" and later that it was "an object lesson for the young landscape painters of Australia".