Whittredge was born in Ohio and apprenticed at the age of seventeen as a sign painter in Cincinnati and worked for a time as a photographer in Indianapolis. The artist turned to landscape painting by the mid-1840s, adopting the Hudson River School style of Thomas Doughty and Thomas Cole. In this forest interior, a lone fisherman is positioned near a large rock formation at the center of the composition. The cascading waterfall is flanked by an area of darkness on the left and sunlit pines on the right.
