Natural Bridge
Flavius Fisher
1882
Oil on canvas
Virginia Historical Society
Lora Robins Collection of Virginia Art

Because of railroads, Natural Bridge was more accessible than ever to tourists when the Lynchburg painter Flavius Fisher painted it in 1882. More than a dozen visitors, including women and children, are pictured at the base of the arch. To them the bridge was a spectacular, but not mysterious site, for it had become accepted that the bridge was created by slow erosion rather than some unfathomable cataclysmic event. To maximize the sense of the bridge's height, Fisher gives the viewer an extremely low perspective, and renders the figures on a tiny scale.