Images
Thomas Cole, View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm — The Oxbow, 1836
Objectives
- Students will understand that Thomas Cole was a founding member of the American landscape painting genre and helped start the Hudson River School of Landscape Painting to document the beauty of the American wilderness and landscape.
- Students will understand that artists make choices about what to include and exclude when they paint a landscape or view.
- Students will understand that the American landscape is in transition in the mid 19th century and that artists are thinking about and documenting the way it is changing.
- Students will paint a watercolor landscape of their own from memory or picture.
Focusing Statement
Today we will be studying American landscape painting. We will be looking together at Thomas Cole’s painting “View From Mt. Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm — The Oxbow.” Painted in 1836 for The National Academy of Design’s annual exhibition, this view was a very popular tourist attraction in its day. We will be comparing Cole’s painting with an etching of the same view from the same time period; Basil Hall’s 1829 “View from Mount Holyoke,” as well as a contemporary painting by Stephen Hannock: “The Oxbow, After Church, After Cole, Flooded, Green Light,” painted in 1999.
We will focus on the choices that Thomas Cole made when he painted this landscape and whether those choices can tell us anything about his feelings and ideas about America during this period of our history.
Background Information
Thomas Cole was one of the members of a school of landscape painters called “The Hudson River School.” This name was given to the group by a critic who believed the work to be old-fashioned and provincial. But the name stuck and now refers to the period of American landscape painting from 1825 to 1875, when our American national identity was very much rooted in our relationship to the land. Before 1800, a great deal of American painting was portraiture — pictures of American people. But for much of the nineteenth century the subject of American art was the painting of its landscape, first in New York and New England, and then out West. During this time, Americans were exploring their continent (Lewis and Clark), expanding their territory through purchase and war, and bitterly arguing over whether a new state would be admitted to the Union as free or slave.
The critic James Jackson Jarves observed in 1864 “The thoroughly American branch of painting, based upon the facts and tastes of the country and people, is the landscape. It surpasses all other in popular favor, and may be said to have reached the dignity of a distinct school.” (The Hudson River School — Nature and the American Vision, Linda S. Ferber, The New York Historical Society, 2009, Skira Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., p.14)
Thomas Cole himself said: “(American scenery) is a subject that to every American ought to be of surpassing interest; for, whether he beholds the Hudson mingling waters with the Atlantic, explores the central wilds of this vast continent, or stands on the margin of the distant Oregon, he is still in the midst of American scenery — it is his own land; its beauty, its magnificence, its sublimity — all are his; and how undeserving of such a birthright, if he can turn towards it an unobserving eye, an unaffected heart!”
Examining Expressive Content
- What do you see in this painting?
- What differences do you see between the right and left sides of the painting?
- Why do you think the artist painted the light so dramatically?
- How does this painting make you feel?
- How is this painting different from the Basil Hall etching?
- How is it the same?
- What else do you wonder about?
- What did the artist choose to include in his painting?