The Prairie on Fire

Alvan Fisher was a pioneering American landscapist whose work offered an important precedent for the Hudson River School. This painting depicts a subject from James Fenimore Cooper’s 1827 novel The Prairie, the third of the five Leatherstocking Tales. In this scene, Natty Bumppo, the hero of the series, has created a firebreak to protect the story’s protagonists. As a Romantic-era artist, Fisher preferred such dramatic episodes, which involved striking contrasts between light and dark. Unlike contemporaneous illustrations of the scene, which give little sense of setting, in this version the figures are dwarfed by nature, and the prairie grasses are exquisitely rendered, underscoring the landscape’s beauty as well as its dangers. The work thus suggests the significance of the prairie in Cooper’s text. Perhaps for this reason, the author declared that it was “the only good illustration he had seen from his books.”