Cole. Thomas - The Falls of the Kaaterskill (1826)

Thomas Cole did not hike up into the Catskill Mountains in 1825 to paint a pretty picture for the drawing rooms of wealthy New Yorkers. He went up there to teach an entire nation how to see. Cole was a young English immigrant who had arrived on American shores convinced that the raw wilderness he found was the most extraordinary landscape on earth. Kaaterskill Falls was his opening argument.

The painting measures a modest twenty five by thirty five inches. Cole painted the 260 foot waterfall dropping in two dramatic stages through a narrow gorge. He put two tiny figures at the very top of the upper falls. They are barely visible specks against the enormous cascade of white water and dark rock. He did this deliberately. He wanted every viewer to feel properly crushed by the scale of what they were looking at.

Cole sent three paintings to New York that fall and left them in the window of a frame shop on Broadway. Three of the most important artists in America walked past the window and stopped dead in their tracks. John Trumbull bought one on the spot. Asher Durand bought one. William Dunlap spread the word. Cole was famous almost overnight.

This small modest canvas launched the entire Hudson River School of American painting. A twenty four year old immigrant with a borrowed paint box walked into the mountains and invented a new way for an entire country to understand itself.

References

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

Powell, Earl A. Thomas Cole. Harry N. Abrams, 1990.

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