Though he was known primarily as a landscape painter, George Henry Durrie also painted portraits and genre scenes. Of the legion of American landscape painters who flourished in the mid nineteenth century, only a few, including Durrie, specialized in winter subjects. This is attributed to a combination of pragmatic and aesthetic impediments. Durrie’s winter landscapes, such as Farmstead in Winter, are suffused with a sense of tranquility and well being, despite their characteristic portrayal of the snowbound countryside locked in the season’s iciest grip. He filled his paintings with casual vignettes of ordinary country life, but these genre elements merely serve to support his primary interest in creating honest descriptions of rural New England.