View on the Catskill, Early Autumn

Thomas Cole painted this view of Catskill Creek in 1836 and 1837, looking west from near his home at Cedar Grove in upstate New York, with the humped shapes of Round Top and Kaaterskill High Peak rising in the haze. A woman in white rests on the bank while a child gathers flowers nearby, and the water curls through the valley like a ribbon of pale light. Cole was the founder of the Hudson River School, the first distinctly American landscape movement, and this is his home ground rendered with real affection: dense summer-green foliage just beginning to turn, a sky stacked with evening clouds, every tree given its own character.

The pleasant scene hides a grievance. While Cole was working on it, crews were cutting a railroad line straight through this valley, felling the trees along the creek. In a letter he called the men responsible "copper-hearted barbarians" and admitted he was painting the place partly from memory, leaving the tracks out entirely. Years later, in 1843, he returned to the same view and painted the railroad in, complete with a locomotive and tree stumps. So this canvas is something like a portrait of a landscape made just before it changed, which explains why the foreground feels so lovingly stocked with weeds, wildflowers, and shaggy undergrowth.