Sanford R. Gifford traveled widely throughout the East Coast, Europe, and the Middle East in search of landscape subjects. His subtle, light-suffused landscapes led him to be associated with a style of Hudson River School landscape painting termed “luminism” by twentieth-century critics.

Gifford, who once described landscape painting as “air painting,” here captures the hazy atmosphere of a sunny afternoon in autumn, using nearly invisible brushstrokes. Praising the work of his recently deceased colleague, John Ferguson Weir wrote: "[Gifford's] finest impressions were those derived from the landscape when the air is charged with an effulgence of irruptive and glowing light, and he dared follow the dictates of his intuitions in placing on the canvas the equivalent of these impressions." [John Ferguson Weir, “Sanford R. Gifford: Artist and Man,”New-York Daily Tribune, September 12, 1880]