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View of Springfield on the Connecticut River
Accession # 50.65
Artist Alvan Fisher
Title View of Springfield on the Connecticut River
Date 1819
Medium Oil on canvas
Dimensions 41 × 53 × 3 in. (104.1 × 134.6 × 7.6 cm)
Signed Signed lower left: "A. Fisher / Pinxt / 1819"
Credit Line Dick S. Ramsay Fund
Location Visible Storage: Case 15, Screen G (Paintings)

Curatorial Remarks: 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.