On Way to Chocorua, New Hampshire

Daniel Huntington's sketch captures a rural landscape in deliberate, economical lines. The composition moves from foreground boats and vegetation through a middle distance populated by figures and structures, to distant mountains. Huntington employs the quick notational style common to nineteenth-century landscape studies—architectural elements, figures, and natural forms rendered with equal attention to compositional balance rather than photographic detail. This drawing exemplifies the artist's practice of field studies, which informed his larger studio works and contributed to the visual documentation of American regional geography during the antebellum period.