Sketchbooks allow artists to work spontaneously in nature, recording a series of immediate impressions. Here, Charles Émile Jacque used a lithographic crayon—a tool more often used in printmaking—to capture a small group of trees and their reflections in a pool of water. On the margin, a pen-and-ink drawing depicts a peasant figure with a large bundle of wood or straw strapped to their back. While Jacque evoked the landscape as a whole, Karl Bodmer focused on individual plant life, particularly the forest undergrowth that might have otherwise gone unnoticed. Although Bodmer used this sketchbook for several years, he added inscriptions to these two studies, dating them to November 30, 1839.