Gignoux in all probability would have visited Niagara, the New World’s most famous landscape spectacle, before beginning his series of paintings of the falls. Skilled as he was in technical shortcuts, however, he would not have gone tramping about in the cold snow and dangerous ice to make sketches from nature as Frederic Church would do in 1856 in preparation for his 1857 Niagara. Instead, when preparing his landscape (the first large painting of the falls in winter ever made), Gignoux would have selected his view–-or rather, composition–-and painted it according to pictorial formulas.