Born in Bellingborough, Lincolnshire, England, Joshua Shaw became a painter of romantic, generic rural landscapes with darkened foregrounds, often with figures, and streams and distant hills. He was among the earliest pure landscape painters in America, and his style was related to the 17th-century idealized landscapes of Claude Lorraine, showing people at ease in the countryside. It was a style replaced in popularity by the French Barbizon School painters whose figures were engaged in more realistic hard-working activity.

Referring to this group of 'pure' landscapists, which included George Harvey, Robert Salmon, Charles Birch and Charles Codman, John Baur, Curator of the Whitney Museum of American Art, said they ...