The Church at Dedham, Mass.

Foster was born in Maine, where he spent his childhood, along with his artist brother, Charles Foster. In 1870, he settled in New York City, and took a mercantile job to support art training. He attended the Art Students League in New York City, and studied privately with Abbott Thayer.

In 1886, like many artists of his era, he went to Paris. He traveled with Leonard Ochtman and Charles Warren Eaton, with whom he had been sharing a New York studio. In Paris, he exhibited paintings at the official Paris Salon. He also went to the French countryside including Barbizon where he painted pastoral scenes.

Foster returned to America in 1887, and lived both in Manhattan and Cornwall Hollow, Connecticut, where he had a country home. The artist typically painted scenes of the New England countryside and sought out "intimate corners of his environment---usually tree-lined ponds, fields, and woodlands---that he liked to depict at contemplative times of day, such as dawn or dusk, and during intermediary times of year." The long shadows of this painting suggest late afternoon.