1816
unspecified
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
A Calm Watering Place--Extensive and Boundless Scene with Cattle is a 1816 unspecified by Alvan Fisher, a American Impressionism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see cows lounging by a river, a ferry unloading two women in fancy dresses, and a wide, quiet landscape under a soft sky. Fisher painted this just after the War of 1812, when Americans were starting to notice their own countryside. He wanted to show that American scenes could be just as worthy as European ones. The cows look almost too perfect—like he polished them up to prove the point. If you like this, look up the subject: america, american.
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.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Alvan Fisher (1792–1863) was an artist, born in Needham.
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