This oil sketch is painted over an original photograph of Niagara Falls which Church may have purchased at the time of his 1856 visit there. A decade later he used this hybrid image as a preparatory study for the large painting of Niagara Falls that is now in the permanent collection of the Scottish National Gallery.

Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution. Gift of Louis P. Church, 1917-4-1350