"Boy Chasing Pig" is one of a series of door panels that the New York art collector Luman Reed (1785-1836) commissioned to enhance the overall appearance of the art gallery in his Manhattan townhouse. As was fashionable among other elite American collectors, the floor plan of Reed's gallery was a double parlor. Two small doors opened into each of the two rooms, and two larger doors divided the double parlor, all of which had recessed panels. With the passion of a true collector, Reed was not one to waste valuable space for displaying works of art and decided to fill the door recesses with original paintings. Calling on Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, George Whiting Flagg, and William Sidney Mount to contribute to the scheme, Reed commissioned panels of simple genre subjects, which were to be executed in a free and uncomposed manner. Fourteen of the original panel paintings survive, four of which are by Cole and the rest attributed to Durand. The New-York Historical Society holds seven of the surviving panels attributed to Durand, including this one, which would have been mounted on one of the smaller doors leading into each room of the picture gallery. The other seven panels are dispersed among private collections and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut.

This interesting canal scene is said to represent the Erie Canal in upstate New York. The attribution to Harvey is not documented.

Thomas Cole, hailed as the founder of the Hudson River School, is best known as a landscape painter, but he also executed a handful of portraits. This work, his only known self portrait, was probably a personal exercise and not meant for public exhibition; though the head and the eyes show a degree of finish, other areas are sketchy, including the large, looping brushstrokes in the background and the dabs of different colored paint at lower left. Cole placed himself off-center, gazing directly at the viewer with a thoughtful expression. The artist's distant gaze has been called Byronic, and indeed, Cole admired the English poet and had drawn from his epic Childe Harold's Pilgrimage for the five-painting series The Course of Empire (1858.1-5) that had consumed him during the mid 1830s. The year 1836 was a momentous one for the artist: he suffered the loss of friend and patron Luman Reed, who had commissioned The Course of Empire; he married Maria Bartow and permanently moved his main residence from New York City to her family home in Catskill; and he completed his long dreamed-of cycle and exhibited it to great acclaim. This painting may represent Cole's reflections on his new life at the age of 35 as a married man living in the country, without the financial assurance of his beloved patron, but contemplating his recent success as he worked to solidify his reputation as a painter not only of landscapes, but also of epic allegories.