Hendrik-Dirk Kruseman Van Elten (1829-1904) was born in Alkmaar, Holland, and received his earliest professional training with Cornelius Lieste in Haarlem, a leading landscape painter of the Dutch Romantic School. After completing his studies, Van Elten traveled extensively throughout Holland and northern Europe, including France, Germany, and Belgium, where he painted and studied museum collections before emigrating to the United States by 1865.

Based in New York City, Van Elten became a regular exhibitor at the National Academy of Design from 1866 to 1900. He was elected an Associate in 1871 and a full Academician in 1883. Although closely identified with New York, he traveled widely, maintaining a summer home in the Catskill Mountains near Ellenville. His meticulously rendered landscapes depict both cultivated farmsteads and remote wilderness scenes across the Northeast, as well as the American West, which he visited during the 1880s and again in 1898. A successful printmaker after 1876, Van Elten also gained international recognition and was elected to London’s Society of Painter-Etchers. Following his death, many works from his studio entered important public and private collections, securing his reputation as a significant late nineteenth-century American landscape painter.