Haseltine was born in Philadelphia to a family of painters. His mother, Elizabeth, was a landscape painter. The artist studied under Paul Weber in Philadelphia, where he was encouraged to continue his studies at the Academy at Düsseldorf, Germany. In the mid-1850s he traveled to the Rhine Valley and the Italian Alps to paint with fellow artists Emanuel Leutze, Worthington Whittredge, and Albert Bierstadt. This watercolor, with its Tyrolean theme, may have been a result of that trip.
