Frederic Edwin Church was a central figure in the Hudson River School of American landscape painters, who produced awe-inspiring panoramas of America's untamed wilderness. These artists believed in the divinity of nature and thought art to be an agent of spiritual transformation. They also provided Americans with a deep feeling of national identity depicting a vast, unspoiled American landscape as a “New Eden.” Church’s large-scale and faithful representation of the falls, Niagara, was considered to be the most famous painting of this site during the 19th century. In this work, the artist places the viewer directly at the brink of the falls, without even the smallest foothold along the riverbank. This print reproduction of Church’s painting was made in 1857.