This view of the Connecitcut River Valley in Massachusetts was painted by Deerfield artist George Fuller. The view is to the south/southeast and the Pocumtuck Range appears on the left. The small settlement of Mill River is in the middle distance. In his early career, Fuller was a portrait artist with a studio in New York City, but when he returned to Deerfield to run his family farm, he began painting landscapes when he could take time from his agricultural tasks. When the glaciers of the last Ice Age began to melt some ten thousand years ago, a huge body of water known as Lake Hitchcock covered the entire scene, with the mountains rising as islands above the lake.