Mountain Lake, Autumn

Considered a second-generation Hudson River School painter, Shattuck turned to landscape painting in the 1850s after beginning his career as a portraitist in Boston. Shattuck moved to New York in 1852 and enrolled in classes at the National Academy of Design, where he first exhibited work in 1855. In 1859, he opened a studio in the famous Tenth Street Studio Building in New York, forming close working relationships with his neighbors, Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Church; he married painter Samuel Colman’s sister, Marion, the following year. In 1870, he and his family moved to Granby, Connecticut, a cattle-raising town steeped in rustic tradition, which provided continual inspiration for his landscape paintings.

In compositions such as this one, the artist combines a precise rendering of detail in the foreground—inspired, in part, by the American Pre-Raphaelite movement—and a slightly more painterly approach to realism in the middle- and background. By the 1870s, Shattuck’s attention turned to untamed wilderness and pastoral themes, reflecting the growing taste in America for the French Barbizon School of painters.