A Calm Watering Place—Extensive and Boundless Scene with Cattle (1816): Art, History and Details

A Calm Watering Place—Extensive and Boundless Scene with Cattle (1816) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Alvan Fisher (American, 1792–1863).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

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.”

Object facts

• Title: A Calm Watering Place—Extensive and Boundless Scene with Cattle
• Date: 1816
• Creator attribution: Alvan Fisher (American, 1792–1863)
• Culture: United States
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on panel
• Dimensions: Unframed: 78 x 102.2 cm (30 11/16 x 40 1/4 in.)
• Collection: American - Painting
• Department: American Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1994.106

A detail from the museum

Some of his fellow artists hired Alvan Fisher to paint animals into their own works because he was so skilled at it.

Collection credit

Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Steinberg, David., "Right Time, Wrong Place", Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland Art: The Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine. Vol. 35 no. 04, April 1995

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.