John Quidor apprenticed with a portrait painter before gaining renown for genre paintings based on the writings of Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, among others. The subject of this painting derives from The Pioneers, one of Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, first published in 1823. In this scene, protagonist Natty Bumppo intervenes to save two young women from a panther. One of two identical canvases painted by Quidor in 1832—the other is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—this version may have belonged to Cooper’s daughter, a noted writer and collector.