When Alanson Fisher was eight his father died, leaving a large and impoverished family. At age ten he left home to support himself by work as a farm laborer. When he was fourteen, and of age to enter a trade, he went to New York. The city life and whatever pursuits he entered there were said to have damaged his health, causing him in 1825 to move to Middlebury, Connecticut, where he briefly worked for a sign painter. After that, Fisher was an apprenticed machinist, opened a shop (which failed), and in 1832 married, adding to his problems the support of a family. Finally, after so many years of trial, he struck upon portraiture-the trade in which he attained success and an adequate means of support.
By 1838, when Fisher first exhibited in an Academy annual, he was living in New York. He was not represented in the 1839 annual but was in 1840 and in every Academy annual exhibition thereafter through 1869. He showed several portraits each year. In the early 1860s he began adding one still-life subject to his yearly submission, suggesting that he had broadened his artistic range at a time when photography had begun narrowing portrait painters' opportunity of a livelihood.
Through all these years his stated addresses were in lower New York; it is likely that these were his studios. Probably by 1860, however, Fisher was living in Brooklyn. He contributed to the first exhibition of the Brooklyn Art Association in 1861 and showed frequently with the association through 1868-again, portraits and fruit pieces. Brooklyn remained his home for the rest of his life.
Fisher also exhibited occasionally with the Washington (D.C.) Art Association and fairly regularly through the 1860s at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia; his representation in the Pennsylvania Academy's 1862 annual exhibition was a portrait of fellow artist Joseph Kyle.
The only known instance of Fisher having publicly shown a work during the last fifteen years of his life is the appearance of his Portrait of a Child in the National Academy's 1880 annual exhibition. The 1880s were years when the Academy was seeking to drop from its membership those artists who habitually did not contribute to its annual exhibitions. It seems likely that Fisher had given up the active practice of portraiture about a decade earlier and had reaffirmed his place in the Academy by submitting an earlier work.
His death was noted among the eulogies read at the Academy's annual meeting of 1885, with the suggestion of the reason for his long absence from the art scene: "Alanson Fisher, ANA, died in Brooklyn, August 4, 1884, after a long period of physical disability. He was a portrait painter of much merit."