Although he spent almost five decades creating accomplished photographs, just a few years before his death Stillman admitted that he did not “consider photography an art or a photographer an artist.” Throughout his life he instead idealized painting, although he had only modest success at it himself, and was editor of The Crayon (1855–61), a widely influential art journal that disseminated the ideas of critic John Ruskin and the associated Pre-Raphaelite artists.

In 1874, turning away from the established industrialism of New England, Stillman photographed picturesque and metaphorical compositions of rustic scenery and trees, possibly including this one, and published a number of them in a portfolio called Poetic Localities of Cambridge. His preface, showing the influence of his close friend and transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, laments that “the ravages of modern improvement bid fair to destroy within not many years the few things amongst us which our poets have made classical.”

—Text taken from the Carter Handbook (2023).