James C. Stodder, American: (1838-1917)

A crescent moon rises above a wooded landscape at dusk while a gentleman fishes from the banks of a pond or stream. Stodder graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York in 1859 and moved to Bangor, Maine, where he first learned the wet-plate process of photography. A lawyer, he was the son of a Boston jeweler, (obit) and financially well off. In 1876, he accompanied famed Hudson River School painter Frederic E. Church to the Mount Katahdin region of Maine.