This large work was painted only two years after Weber immigrated to the United States from Germany. Weber began exhibiting works at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1849 and continued to exhibit there throughout his career. The subject shows a rich, shadowy woodland interior with a stream and a vignette of a solitary hunter at rest with his gun and dog. The landscape conveys the notion of forest interior as natural sanctuary, a primeval cathedral. Many artists of the Hudson River School captured a sense of the divine, envisioning the pristine American landscape as a great new Garden of Eden. The subject of the “primeval forest” was taken up by other painters of the 19th century, most famously by Asher B. Durand. Poet William Cullen Bryant described the primeval forest in “A Forest Hymn”, (1824):The groves were God’s first temples.Ere man learnedTo hew the shaft and lay the architraveAnd spread the roof above them--ere he framedThe lofty vault, to gather and roll backThe sound of anthems; in the darkling woodAmidst the cool and silence, he knelt down,And offered to the Mightiest solemn thanksAnd supplication.
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