Landscape painter William Bliss Baker had gained conspicuous distinction in both oil and watercolor work before a fatal ice skating accident at the age of twenty-seven. He was considered one of America’s most promising young artists. Baker was born in New York City in 1859 and spent his childhood in the town of Ballston Spa, New York. Beginning regular art studies at the National Academy of Design at the age of seventeen, Baker won the Elliott prize for drawing in 1879. He is also noted as having studied under Mauritz de Haas (1832-1895) and with the panoramic landscape artist Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902). He maintained a studio in upstate New York above Albany and began exhibiting yearly at the National Academy in 1881. Although not yet twenty-five, he entered the forefront of landscape painting in 1885 when he won the Academy's Hallgarten Prize. He sought to express the natural world in his own unique, precise, and truthful style.