The Pic Nic

A picnic cloth spread on the grass, a flute player leaning against a tree, women in pale dresses chatting in the shade: Thomas Cole painted this scene in 1846, near the end of his life, and it is unusually lighthearted for him. Cole is best known as the founder of the Hudson River School and as a painter of thundering allegories about empires rising and falling. Here he simply shows a party of well-dressed New Yorkers spending an afternoon by a lake in the Catskills, with a rowboat drifting out on the water and the late sun catching the hills in the distance.

Still, old habits show up. The trees loom enormous over the tiny figures, and down in the right foreground sits a cut stump, pale and raw against the grass. Cole put stumps like this in painting after painting, and he meant them seriously: in his 1836 writings he complained bitterly about Americans chopping down the forests in the name of progress. So this cheerful outing carries a small warning in its corner, the suggestion that the very people enjoying the wilderness are the ones steadily clearing it. The painting now lives at the Brooklyn Museum, and it is worth noticing how little of it is actually about the picnickers. They occupy a thin band of lawn; everything above and around them belongs to the trees.