View of a Lake

Contrasting the many American landscape painters who conveyed nature's power through raging storms and blasted trees, Doughty emphasized the quiet power of the outside world in his idyllic paintings. Largely self-taught, he often drew from nature and skillfully transformed his detailed observances into soft, poetic depictions of the landscape. This work exhibits Doughty's penchant for inserting small figures in the center of the middle ground. The scale of the two boys on the lake's edge allows the viewer to focus on the expansive scenery, thereby emphasizing the diminutive nature of humankind in relation to the vast landscape.