Thomas Charles Farrer (1839-1891), Mount Tom, 1865, oil on canvas, John Wilmerding Collection

British-born Thomas Charles Farrer produced painstaking, minutely observed images, reflecting the writings of John Ruskin, the influential critic who valued "truth to nature" above all other aesthetic qualities. Mount Tom was painted in the summer of 1865 when Farrer and his wife visited the Connecticut River Valley near Northampton, Massachusetts, a popular destination for nineteenth-century travelers in search of picturesque landscape.