The Oxbow, View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm

A thunderstorm is rolling off to the left while the sun already blazes on the right, and Thomas Cole has split his canvas almost exactly down the middle to make the point. On one side: a lightning-blasted tree, tangled undergrowth, rain still falling on dark wooded slopes. On the other: the Connecticut River curling into its famous oxbow loop near Northampton, with tidy fields, grazing cattle, and thin columns of smoke rising from farms. Painted in 1836, it is the signature work of the Hudson River School, the first real homegrown American art movement, and Cole was its founder. He was asking a genuine question of his countrymen, who were clearing forests at enormous speed: how much wilderness should be traded for farmland?

Cole put himself in the picture. Near the center, just below the rocky outcrop, a tiny figure in a hat sits with a portfolio and an umbrella, turning to look back out at us. He is the painter at work, caught between the two worlds. Even stranger, the cleared patches on the distant hillside have been read as Hebrew letters spelling a word for the Almighty, visible only if the canvas is turned upside down, as though God were reading the landscape from above. Cole knocked the painting out fairly quickly to earn money while laboring over his grander series The Course of Empire, which may explain why it feels less staged than his allegories. Mount Holyoke was already a tourist destination then, complete with a summit house, so visitors to the Metropolitan Museum are looking at a view that plenty of Americans had climbed up to see for themselves.