The Oxbow by Thomas Cole

The Oxbow by Thomas Cole

Wilderness and farmland

Its full title is View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm. The left half is wild: a shattered tree clinging to the rocks, dense forest and a black storm still dragging rain across the hills. The right half is settled and sunlit, with the Connecticut River swinging round in its great oxbow loop and fields and farms laid out on the flat land inside the bend and beyond. The storm is passing, and the whole picture turns on the line where dark gives way to light. Among the rocks at the bottom centre, a tiny figure at an easel is the painter himself.

A picture for the Academy

Cole painted it in 1836 for the annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design in New York, breaking off from his long series The Course of Empire to do so. He wrote to his patron that the view from Mount Holyoke was the finest scene in his sketchbook and a well-known one. The panorama was too wide for a single view, so Cole joined two sketches together. The contrast between the two halves has been read ever since as a picture of wilderness meeting civilisation. Cole is regarded as the founder of the Hudson River School of American landscape painting.

Where it hangs

The painting is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, given by Mrs Russell Sage in 1908. It measures 130.8 by 193 centimetres.

About this print

Made from a 4,000-pixel photograph of the original, enough to print sharply at up to about 26 inches on its longest side.

Sources: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York · Wikidata Q3172259 · Wikimedia Commons