Restore desktop background

A few months ago as I was browsing the web, I found a picture of one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen. Unfortunately it was just a pic with no caption to ID the location. I set it as my desktop background with the intent of eventually finding where it was and visiting there. This morning at the end of an 11 hour shift, I went to set a screen saver, and accidentally changed my desktop background. Since that pic isn't a default mac background, and I didn't physically save it anywhere, I don't know how to restore it. I spent about 40 minutes browsing images on the web again, with no luck. I checked the default location for desktop images and as expected, there are just the usual images. Any help would  be greatly appreciated.

lllaass wrote:
If you selected the image in Safari and then right clicked on Use Image as Desktop Picture and then changed to another it appears it is gone since I just tried it and then tried to search for the name of the picture and it was not found.
Does this mean that the image is being loaded from the web? That seems kind of unworkable: does the image go away if you are not connected to the Internet? And if it doesn't it must be stored somewhere. But if it is, apparently hidden?

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