A Wild Scene

A storm is breaking up over a mountain wilderness, and on the rocky outcrop at the left a hunter stands silhouetted against the pale dawn, bow raised. Below him, more figures move among the boulders, and across the water on the right another man climbs through the roots of a huge, half dead tree. No buildings, no roads, no farms. Thomas Cole painted this in 1831 and 1832 while living in Florence, and the whole point of the scene is that human beings have barely arrived.

Cole made this picture to settle an argument. His Baltimore patron Robert Gilmor Jr. believed landscape painters should copy real places faithfully; Cole insisted that a painter could invent a scene from memory and imagination and still speak the truth. "A Wild Scene" was his answer, a landscape assembled entirely in his head, and it worked so well that he recycled its ideas a few years later in "The Savage State," the opening canvas of his famous five part series "The Course of Empire." As the founding figure of the Hudson River School, Cole liked landscapes that carried a moral argument, and the thundercloud rolling off the peak while the eastern sky brightens does the work here: this is the world at its beginning, before civilization shows up and starts the cycle of rise and ruin.