Thomas Cole's Falls of the Kaaterskill
I n 1826, Thomas Cole, a transplanted Englishman, painted this view of the Kaaterskill Falls in New York State, and thereby launched the first genuinely American school of painting, the Hudson River School. The painting is an evocative image of a wild landscape, an inverted triangle through which the river falls, from the upper right through a dark chasm to the second falls at the center left, leaping toward the viewer and crashing onto the rocks below. An otherworldly shaft of light falls from the threatening sky above and illuminates the brilliant colors of the autumn foliage flanking the lower falls and the bright white of the water, contrasting dramatically with the darkness of the surrounding rocks and the gathering storm.
In the center, at the brink of the falls, stands a lone figure, at first hard to spot and then impossible to overlook. It is a solitary Indian, a tiny figure in a vast landscape, surveying the works of nature. This is not an uninhabited wilderness, but one that includes the history of man. Or perhaps its beginnings—this is primordial man, an Adam-like figure confronting the implacable forces of creation.
There is much to unpack here. The notion of wilderness had already entered into the American literary consciousness, especially in the works of James Fenimore Cooper, (including a description of these falls), some of which Thomas Cole illustrated in his paintings of The Last of the Mohicans. The wilderness was seen not as static but as a crucible of change, of both creation and destruction. Notice that in his view of the falls, Cole has included trees in all stages of life, from the evergreen wall at the skyline, through the oranges and reds of the fall hardwoods, to the twisted dead trees in the foreground. Over it all swirls the storm rising over the valley, conveying a sense of danger and catastrophic change from above.
Conveying the Sublime
The reality of this wilderness spot was a little different from what Thomas Cole portrayed. Already by 1825 the Indians had been displaced, and the falls had become a tourist attraction, an easy steamboat journey up the Hudson from New York City. Stairs had been installed beside the stream, and a viewing platform and railing, here edited out, allowed for a safe and civilized overlook. Additionally, an enterprising hotelier had dammed the river with a series of sluice gates that could be opened and shut to turn the falls on and off for more spectacular tourist views.
Furthermore, for all its freshness and immediacy, the painting was not made on the spot, but composed in the studio in the approved academic fashion from a series of notes, drawings and oil sketches, some of which still exist. In the studio, Cole drew upon what he called his "mind's eye vision" to reconstruct the scene as he felt it ought to look. Clearly this is an idealized landscape. But what ideal was Cole attempting to convey?
Esthetic theory of the day divided landscape into two categories, the Beautiful and the Sublime. Whereas the Beautiful was peaceful, harmonious, pleasing, and safe, the Sublime evoked an element of terror, inspiring awe and ultimately exhilaration and a transcendent delight, bringing one into a closer connection with the divine forces of nature. Cole's American wilderness, with its threatening sky, towering rocks, and tumbled trees, as well as the force of the rushing water, must be understood as an expression of the Sublime.
Efforts at History Painting
Thomas Cole was a deeply religious man. He was a poet and an architect as well as a painter (professional lines were not so sharply drawn in his day), and in addition to landscape he also turned his hand to history painting. History painting, considered the loftiest of artistic subjects, included scenes from literature, allegory, mythology, and Scripture, expressing the grandest themes of the human experience. Cole painted one series entitled The Course of Empire, dramatic imaginary landscapes depicting the rise and fall of an idealized empire, from the savage state through the Arcadian age to the consummation of empire, and then to its decline into destruction and desolation, when nature engulfs the ruins. Another series depicts The Voyage of Life, in which an individual soul passes through youth, manhood, old age, and death in equally dramaticlandscape settings.
But for all his lofty ambitions, Cole never reaches the same evocative power and emotional force in his didactic histories as he does in his depiction of the American wilderness. There, he simply evokes the wild as awe- and terror-inspiring and exhilarating, revealing the forces of creation and destruction and the hand of the divine.
An Act of Religion
Mary Elizabeth Podles is the retired curator of Renaissance and Baroque art at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. She is the author of A Thousand Words: Reflections on Art and Christianity (St. James Press, 2023). She and her husband Leon, a Touchstone senior editor, have six children and live in Baltimore, Maryland. She is a contributing editor for Touchstone.
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