The Hunter's Return

Two hunters trudge home with a deer slung from a pole between them, while a child dashes down the path to meet them and a woman in white waits by the cabin door. Thomas Cole painted this scene in 1845, near the end of his life, and he filled it with the small details of frontier housekeeping: a fenced garden patch, a rough lean-to shed, a split-rail fence, chickens pecking in the dirt. The mountain rising behind them looks a great deal like Mount Chocorua in New Hampshire, a peak Cole sketched on his travels through the White Mountains.

Cole is usually called the founder of the Hudson River School, the group of American landscape painters who treated scenery as a subject worthy of grand treatment. He loved wilderness, but he was uneasy about what settlers were doing to it, and that tension sits right in the middle of this painting. Count the tree stumps and fallen trunks scattered across the foreground. The family's snug home exists only because a patch of forest came down to make room for it. Cole leaves the question open rather than scolding anyone, and the autumn reds and golds he spreads across the hillsides make the whole arrangement look, for the moment, perfectly balanced.