[piano music playing] (Dr. Steven Zucker)
We're in the Metropolitan
Museum of Art looking at Thomas Cole's "View from Mount Holyoke,
Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm--
The Oxbow." (Dr. Beth Harris)
Right. But we know it
as "The Oxbow." (Dr. Zucker)
It's a Hudson River
School painting by Thomas Cole who's credited with founding
American landscape painting. (Dr. Harris)
Landscape painting was
ranked very low by the academies
in Europe. (Dr. Zucker)
And painting was ranked
very low in American society. [Dr. Harris laughing]
That's true. And when Americans
did want paintings, they didn't want
grand, mythological scenes. They wanted portraits
or landscapes or views like this one. (Dr. Zucker)
And this is a view of a
well-known, unusual, natural scene, a place where the
Connecticut River bends back on itself. (Dr. Harris)
This is a really large painting. I think it's five
or six feet wide and five feet high. And that speaks to the importance
that Thomas Cole wanted to give to landscape painting, landscape painting, considered
this lowly genre, but here made not
only large in size but Cole, even here
in this view, trying to say something
more with landscape. When we think of
Thomas Cole, we think of "The
Course of Empire," or "The Voyage
of Life", these moments when he
tries to use landscape to say something big, but something big
is hidden here, too. (Dr. Zucker)
This is really ambitious. And it's not
just landscape. It's about transformation. It's about time. It's about a kind
of metamorphosis. (Dr. Harris)
Well, it's about America, and what America is
going to become. (Dr. Zucker)
So on the left side, we see a storm-ravaged landscape. We see a broken tree. We see rain pouring down, birds that seem
to be frantic as they fly
through the sky, and we can even make out
a little bit of a lightning bolt at the extreme left. (Dr. Harris)
So we have
what art historians and art critics
at the time even referred to
as "the sublime," an image of nature
that is wild and untamed and frightening
and awesome. (Dr. Zucker)
This untouched wilderness,
this virgin forest, was seen in stark
contrast to the built environment
of old Europe, and so here was a
promise of the new. It was America
as a new Eden. (Dr. Harris)
And this is so different
than what Cole gives us on the other side, which is Americans settling
this virgin landscape, transforming it into
cultivated plots of land, into areas to graze
their livestock, into places to settle
and build homes. And the storm is passing.
The sun is coming. And there's a sense
that this settling of the land is something which
is ordained by God which is approved by God. (Dr. Zucker)
And this is really
tied in with the American notion of manifest destiny, that Americans were
meant to tame this landscape, that this was ours. And in fact, at least
one art historian has looked at the
hill in the center of the painting and read in that
Hebrew letters. (Dr. Harris)
When looked at
from above, and in reverse, from God's viewpoint, they seem to read
from the Hebrew, the word "Shaddai,"
which means "almighty", referring to God. So that idea that
this is God's plan, and God has
blessed America. (Dr. Zucker)
Now in art historical terms
what this is, is the transition from
the sublime to the pastoral. (Dr. Harris)
The pastoral being
a peaceful idea of landscape, of man inhabiting landscape
with a sense of tranquility and peacefulness. (Dr. Zucker)
And we can see that in all of these anecdotal
vignettes that Cole gives us. If you look at the
lower right corner of the painting,
for instance, you can see a ferry
that's been carefully rendered. You can see people that
have been let off at one side, and people who are now
crossing over to the other. (Dr. Harris)
And a pathway that goes
down to some farmland, and places where
sheep are grazing, and our eye can travel
up and back through the chimney
stacks of a few houses here and there, up through a valley where
the sun is shining between two hills, and up those bright clouds
and the sunshine, and that sense of promise. (Dr. Zucker)
There's also a
wonderful specificity that I think is very much
meant to entertain and to represent the
particularity of nature. If you look at
the left side, you can see there's
fungus that's growing out of the blasted
tree trunk. You can just make out a bird
on one of the blasted bows, but probably the most
fun is at the bottom center of the canvas, the artist himself
looking back at us. (Dr. Harris)
And next to him,
just slightly up the hill, is his supplies, his umbrella that
will shelter him, a portfolio,
a chair. (Dr. Zucker)
But that chair is
also a cross. And so we understand
not only the passage of time here, the transition from
wilderness to a paradise that man is creating, but we also understand
this all within a Christian context. (Dr. Harris)
His portfolio which has
his name on it reads as the signature
of this painting, also reads as
a tombstone for the artist. So there is that sense
of the passage of time. But I want to go back to
a word that you used a moment ago, and that was "entertain", because here we are,
first half of the 19th century, there's a middle class audience. and a new rising
merchant class from which Cole is
drawing his patrons, but there is this real
need to entertain, to exhibit these paintings
and make them fun for people to look at. This is not complicated -- (Dr. Zucker)
It's not mythology. (Dr. Harris)
No. It's something that
everyday Americans could relate to and
really fall in love with. [piano music]