George Lafayette Clough was born in Auburn, New York to a lower-middle class family who had relocated to Auburn from Boston a decade earlier. As an artist, he was nearly entirely self -taught. Clough obtained some instruction in 1838 and achieved minor local popularity painting portraits, but it was not until Clough met Charles Loring Elliot (1812-1868) that his career began in earnest.

Clough spent a portion of 1847 working in Elliot’s New York City studio, and in 1848 he exhibited two paintings at the National Academy of Design. He spent the next year in Europe studying pictures at the Lourve and enjoying an abbreviated version of the Grand Tour before returning to Auburn. His homecoming coincided with a shift in his artistic focus. He adopted a moderately loose variant of the Hudson River School style and went on to paint forest interiors and waterside scenes that reinforced the popular idea of a pastoral antebellum America.