Alvan Fisher’s bucolic view of Springfield, Massachusetts, from across the Connecticut River typifies the kind of landscapes that were popular in the period. It describes a specific locale—note the steepled First Church on the far bank—using the well-known artistic vocabulary of the “Claudian” landscape. This compositional format, based on the widely emulated works of the seventeenth-century French painter Claude Lorrain, creates an ordered progression through space from a dark foreground stage framed by trees to a well-lit body of water in the middle ground to hazy hills in the background.