North Elba was David Coughtry's first large-scale oil painting. It shows a view looking toward the high peaks of the Adirondacks across a meadow known as the Plains of Abraham. In their somber mood of solitude and reverence, Coughtry's landscapes are reminiscent of the romantic realism of earlier Hudson River School painters. The painting was the Albany Institute Purchase Prize for the 1984 Exhibition of the Artists of the Mohawk-Hudson Region.