A Calm Watering Place--Extensive and Boundless Scene with Cattle

From the Cleveland Museum of Art record

In this prime example of Fisher’s early rural pictures, a ferry delivers two wealthy women and their belongings ashore, as a herd of especially handsome cattle rests in the foreground. Boston-based Fisher was among the first American artists to specialize in landscape, recalling that “This species of painting being novel in this part of the country, I found it a more lucrative, pleasant and distinguishing branch of the art than portrait painting.” Some of his fellow artists hired Alvan Fisher to paint animals into their own works because he was so skilled at it.