Raised in an artistic family—his father a printmaker and his brother a painter—James David Smillie began painting landscapes in the mid-1860s, embarking on extended sketching trips and returning to his New York studio to execute larger works for exhibition. This unfinished oil sketch emerged from a prolific two-month-long visit to New Hampshire’s White Mountains, during which Smillie sketched along the hillsides and local rivers. Here, a winding path leads the eye through patchwork fields to the distinctive rock face of White Horse Ledge, named for the image of a horse carved into the mountainside by rainwater.