Gardens of the Van Rensselaer Manor House

A reddish gravel path curls up from the bottom of the canvas and simply stops in the middle of a mowed lawn, where a figure in dark clothing stands alone. Beyond, elms and maples part like a stage curtain to reveal the Hudson Valley and the blue hump of distant hills. Thomas Cole painted this around 1840 for the Van Rensselaer family of Albany, and the most curious thing about it is what he left out: the manor house itself, the whole reason for the commission, is nowhere in sight. Instead he gives us the view from the grounds, which flatters the owners by suggesting that everything the eye can reach belongs to them.

Cole is usually remembered for thunderous wilderness scenes and moralizing allegories like The Course of Empire, so a polite estate portrait like this one sits a little oddly in his output. The timing makes it more interesting. The Van Rensselaers were patroons, descendants of Dutch landholders who had collected rent from tenant farmers across hundreds of thousands of acres since the 1600s. When old Stephen Van Rensselaer III died in 1839, his heirs tried to collect decades of unpaid back rent, and the farmers revolted in what became known as the Anti-Rent War. This sunlit, well-raked lawn was painted just as the system that paid for it was coming apart. The grounds are gone now, swallowed by Albany's rail yards and factories, which makes the two tiny figures by the path feel smaller still.