The Genesis of the American Wild

Thomas Cole did not paint Lake with Dead Trees to capture a pretty vacation spot. He painted it because he rode a steamboat up the Hudson River and saw the face of the divine in the rough American dirt.

It was 1825. The country was young and restless and desperate for a mythology of its own. Cole handed them a myth on a twenty-seven by thirty-three inch canvas. He stepped off that noisy boat and immediately threw oil onto canvas. He wanted to freeze the eternal wilderness before the march of industry could pave it over.

The shattered trunks jutting out of the water are not just dead wood. They are a monument to mortality. They stand there rotting to remind us that human time is a blink while the wild earth remains indifferent.

Cole stuck the finished piece in a dusty New York City shop window. He probably just hoped to cover his rent. Instead he caught the eye of John Trumbull. Trumbull was the grand old man of American art who painted the founding generation. The old man bought the painting on the spot and publicly admitted this unknown kid had already beaten him at his own game.

That single purchase lit the fuse for the Hudson River School. Cole did not just paint a lake in the woods. He invented the American landscape and sold us a wild dream of nature that we are still trying to find.

References

Avery, Kevin J. American Paradise The World of the Hudson River School. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1987.

Howat, John K. The Hudson River and Its Painters. New York: Viking Press, 1972.

Parry, Ellwood C. The Art of Thomas Cole Ambition and Imagination. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988.