Taming The Wilds, With Regret

Clive Aslet assesses the significance of the pioneering environmentalist and father of American landscape painting.

This exhibition presents us with a masterpiece. View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm— The Oxbow is painted from a vantage point high above the River Connecticut. it is an idyllic scene. On the left is Nature— lush, teeming and untamed, with the jagged stump and battered trunks of some storm-torn trees in the foreground. Rain clouds are passing.

As they leave the right-hand side of the painting, a scene of ordered cultivation on the plain below us is bathed in a golden light.

if we look carefully enough, guided by a projecting umbrella, we see the artist, a dapper figure in a straw-coloured top hat, who Thomas Cole at the National Gallery Clive Aslet assesses the significance of the pioneering environmentalist and father of American landscape painting glances backwards as if we’d surprised him, a dab of yellow paint on the brush he’s holding in front of his canvas. Painted in 1836, when Thomas Cole was 35, The Oxbow is an essay on the American landscape at the moment of transition from rude wilderness to productive farmland.

With our sensitivity to eco issues, we might now read the painting as a lament or warning. That same year, Cole published an Essay on American Scenery, which extolled the ‘wildness’ that had long disappeared from Europe—where ‘the once tangled wood is now a lawn’—but still existed across parts of America.