Winter Fishing on the Charles River

Neal left his native Massachusetts at the age of fourteen to pursue a career as an artist. After working in New Orleans and San Francisco, he went, in 1861, to Munich to study at the Royal Academy. He lived in Germany the rest of his life. Neal is known for his large, dramatically-lit genre paintings. Winter Fishing on the Charles River, in which the city of Boston is visible in the background, is one of his earliest recorded works.