While Charles Ethan Porter was best known for his still-life paintings of fruit or flowers, his depictions of landscapes also reflect his interest in faithfully capturing the natural environment. This example shows the softer and freer brushwork Porter adopted after studying in Paris in the early 1880s, where he was perhaps inspired by the French Impressionists. The warm harmonious tones of this small sketch demonstrate why the famous American landscape painter Frederick Church (1826–1900) stated that Porter “had no superior as a colorist.”