View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow

1836

Oil on canvas, 130.8 × 193 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

A storm moves away from a sharp bend in the Connecticut River, seen from a mountain lookout. Wild forest lies on one side of the valley and cleared, sunlit farmland on the other.

Look at the tiny figure beside the parasol in the lower foreground: Cole painted himself at his easel, glancing back at us.
The Met also owns a sketch for the composition, made the same year in oil and pencil on board.
Storm clouds and a shattered tree hang over the wild side; haystacks and sheep dot the fields, and the river loops around a flat tongue of farmland. The Met reads this contrast as settlers moving into land then thought of as untamed wilderness.
Given to the Met in 1908 by Mrs. Russell Sage.

Hudson River School: A later name for American landscape painters, about 1825–1875, centered on Cole and on scenery of the Hudson Valley and nearby mountains.

Image: The Met Open Access · CC0