This image represents one quarter of the total painting of the Mississippi Riverfront that depicts the tragic results of the fire of 1849. The catastrophe resulted when a barge caught fire and drifted down the busy riverfront, spreading the fire to boats and docks along the way. The artwork's long narrow format relates the work to the tradition of panorama painting popular in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century.

Undated documentation attached to the reverse of the painting indicates the donor’s name and attributes the work to an artist called “Lamasson,” although the work is unsigned and no information about this artist has been located. Stylistically, the work is nearly identical to that of better-known panorama artist Henry Lewis who was known to have painted several scenes related to this fire. A smaller version of this painting that is signed “Lemasson” is known to have descended in the Henry Lewis family.

Henry Lewis and his father arrived in St. Louis in 1836. They had come to the United States from England ten years earlier and had settled in Boston, but it was in the Missouri river town that young Lewis found his artistic inspiration. Almost entirely self-taught, Lewis became known for his landscape paintings. His travels throughout the area in the 1840s resulted in numerous sketches and paintings, some of which served as inspiration for his mural of the Mississippi River that was twelve feet high and over thirteen hundred feet long.