Mount Chocorua, New Hampshire

A lone figure in red stands at the water's edge, small enough that you might miss him on a first pass, with the whole of Mount Chocorua rising behind him into a pale morning sky. Thomas Cole painted this White Mountains scene in the late 1820s, not long after the trips to the Catskills and New England that made his name. He was English by birth, arriving in America as a teenager, and he had a knack for finding American wilderness subjects just as the country was beginning to want pictures of itself. The dead tree leaning in from the right, stripped of bark and reaching over the pond, is a motif he returned to again and again: a reminder that even in a peaceful view, things decay and fall.

The mountain carries a story that Cole's audience would have known. Chocorua was a Pemigewasset leader, and according to a widely repeated New England legend, he died on the summit after a dispute with settlers, cursing the land and the people who took it. Whether or not the tale is true, it turned the peak into a kind of haunted landmark, and writers and painters treated it as one. Knowing this makes that small figure on the shore read differently. Cole places him with his back to us, facing the water and the mountain, present in the scene but not quite part of the comfortable, sunlit world the painting otherwise offers.