Oil on Canvas
22 x 27 inches
Signed on reverse and dated 1839

William Sidney Mount has explored this subject matter in a number of his genre paintings, experimenting with various seasons and locations along the Hudson Valley. Similar characters, two boys engaged in the activity of setting traps for small game, recur in different pose, composition and setting. It seems that Mount enjoyed exploring this subject in his visual exploration of rural life in New England.

William Sidney Mount (November 26, 1807 – November 19, 1868) was a 19th-century American genre painter. Born in Setauket, New York in 1807, Mount spent much of his life in his hometown and the adjacent village of Stony Brook, where he painted portraits, landscapes, and scenes inspired by daily life from the 1820s until his death in 1868 at the age of sixty. During that time he achieved fame in the U.S. and Europe as a painter who chronicled rural life on Long Island. He was the first native-born American artist to specialize in genre painting. Mount was also passionate about music and a fiddle player, a composer and collector of songs, and designed and patented several versions of his own violin which he named the "Cradle of Harmony." Many of his paintings also feature musicians and groups of people engaged in dance in rural settings.