This painting of Mount Washington in New Hampshire, while stunning, is an artistic fiction. The area surrounding the tallest peak in the Northeast United States had already long been settled by Europeans. John Frederick Kensett rendered this scene as a site largely untouched by settlers, a popular theme for landscape artists of this era. This practice also played into the myth of America as a land of pure, rugged wilderness. Kensett assembled this work from reference sketches rather than replicating an exact vista, and included Indigenous figures in the foreground to evoke a pre-settlement scene.