4. Directionality: The Art of Orientation

This chapter proposes directionality as a key term for ecocritical interpretation, concentrating on the painter Thomas Cole (1801–1848) and his most famous canvas, View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow of 1836 (fig. 1). The word “directionality” here refers to the ways in which some works of art communicate an especially powerful sense of specificity about place by inviting us to look in certain directions, thereby prompting reflection about actual environments as opposed to mythic or fictive allegorical settings. This might seem to recall familiar questions about topographic realism, the gaze, or phenomenology, but as I see it, directionality entails something else. Directionality involves visual engagement with the beholder’s palpable sense of geographical knowledge, historical context, and corporeal orientation at an actual place and time—the implication of being and seeing there. As someone brought up in Iowa during the second half of the twentieth century, I was generally aware of my orientation vis-à-vis the cardinal directions at a given site, because the American Midwest was so thoroughly colonized, settled, and structured with those directions in mind. Yet I had little understanding of the historical power relations involved in that colonial-spatial matrix. Indeed, many Americans seem oblivious to both directionality and to the history of colonization, perhaps more now than ever, thanks in part to satellite-based navigation and other digital devices.1 The scholarship on Thomas Cole is enormous. For recent discussions, see Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser and Tim Barringer, Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2018); Tim Barringer, Picturesque and Sublime: Thomas Cole’s Trans-Atlantic Inheritance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018); and Annette Blaugrund, Franklin Kelly, and Barbara Novak, Thomas Cole: The Artist as Architect (New York: Monacelli, 2016). For an important earlier study, see William H. Truettner and Alan Wallach, Thomas Cole: Landscape into History (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art in association with Yale University Press, 1994). On the history of the Midwest, see Kristin L. Hoganson, The Heartland: An American History (New York: Penguin, 2020); and Nicole Etcheson, The Emerging Midwest: Upland Southerners and the Political Culture of the Old Northwest, 1787–1861 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996). See also Jon K. Lauck, Gleaves Whitney, and Joseph Hogan, eds., Finding a New Midwestern History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020); and Jason Weems, Barnstorming the Prairies: How Aerial Vision Shaped the Midwest (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

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Description: View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm—The...

Fig. 1. Thomas Cole, View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow, 1836. Oil on canvas, 51 1/2 × 76 in. (130.8 × 193 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Historical art often presupposed and communicated a vivid awareness of directionality, because past artists and their audiences were by necessity knowledgeable about geography, history, and changing environmental conditions—even if they were not environmentalists. Cole was no impressionist, nor was he a modern environmental activist, though he did sometimes complain verbally about what we today would call ecological problems caused by economic development. And while he was a romantic painter well known for producing sublime allegories set in mythic landscapes, his work could also be quite precise about specific details and environmental conditions in real places at particular times. By attending to directionality in Cole’s Oxbow and other creative works of the past, ecocritical art history can help recover a lost world of environmentally informed looking, in which visual orientation played a fundamental role in how people understood themselves and their places. It can also assist in demonstrating the implication of landscape painting as a genre in forgotten or elided colonial politics and environmental histories.2 Scott Slovic, “Ecocriticism: Storytelling, Values, Communication, Contact,” in Going Away to Think: Engagement, Retreat, and Ecocritical Responsibility (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2008). See also Scott Slovic, Swarnalatha Rangarajan, and Vidya Sarveswaran, eds., Routledge Handbook of Ecocriticism and Environmental Communication (New York: Routledge, 2019).

A TRANSNATIONAL ARTIST

Cole is particularly interesting as a topic for this purpose because he was a transnational artist whose life and work traveled in multiple directions. Born in Lancashire, England, during the early Industrial Revolution, he grew up in a petit bourgeois family of textile printers. Raised amid growing economic stratification, environmental degradation, and labor-management conflicts between Luddites and capitalists, Cole witnessed firsthand the price of modern “progress” as a youth. Upon moving with his family to the United States in 1818, he gave up industrial labor and learned fine art painting on the fly as an itinerant student and picture maker, living in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and eventually settling in New York City by 1825. In that year, the newly opened Erie Canal linked the burgeoning metropolis to an expanding transportation network that gave access to the continental interior and facilitated rapid commercial growth. The year 1825 also saw the establishment of the National Academy of Design, a New York arts institution committed to transplanting European aesthetic standards to America, with Cole as a founding member. After conducting innovative experiments in landscape painting in the Catskill Mountains and along the Hudson River north of the city, Cole found a ready audience for his work among landed gentry and urban bourgeois patrons desiring therapeutic visions of wilderness and pastoral beauty. In other words, he cultivated clientele among those whose economic fortunes were in many cases directly tied to transportation, banking, and other commercial enterprises of the early nineteenth-century American market revolution. Rising to prominence as a leader in American landscape painting during the late 1820s and 1830s, Cole helped raise the genre’s standing in the American art world as a vehicle for expression about national values. However, as a native Englishman who returned to Europe for extended visits on two occasions (1829–32, 1841–42), he retained an international historical perspective that tempered his patriotism and even led him to critique some of the imperial impulses of Manifest Destiny in his adopted country. After dying prematurely of illness in 1848, Cole eventually was dubbed the “father” of what became known as the Hudson River School of landscape painting.3 On Cole’s early years, see Tim Barringer, “Thomas Cole’s Atlantic Crossings,” in Kornhauser and Barringer, Thomas Cole’s Journey, 19–61. See also the early biography by Louis Legrand Noble, The Course of Empire: Voyage of Life, and Other Pictures of Thomas Cole, N.A., with Selections from His Letters and Miscellaneous Writings; Illustrative of His Life, Character, and Genius (New York: Cornish, Lamport, 1853). For information about the Erie Canal and the development of New York, see Catherine Hoover Voorsanger and John K. Howat, eds., Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825–1861 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013), 3–4, 9, 10, 19, 25, 44, 109–14, 123, 18–90, 227, 287–88, 327, 331, 355, 361; and Gerard Koeppel, Bond of Union: Building the Erie Canal and the American Empire (New York: DaCapo, 2010).

Having lived and died before Ernst Haeckel coined “ecology” in 1866, Cole had no access to that term, but he expressed unmistakable concern about deforestation and other environmental problems associated with economic development in early nineteenth-century America. The artist only had an inchoate, aesthetic understanding of ecological relationships, but his works and words nevertheless communicate valuable information and ideas about the real environmental conditions shaping his world. In a now famous passage from his “Essay on American Scenery,” published the same year he painted The Oxbow, Cole explained:

It was my intention to attempt a description of several districts remarkable for their picturesqueness and truly American character. . . . Yet I cannot but express my sorrow that the beauty of such landscapes is quickly passing away—the ravages of the axe are daily increasing—the most noble scenes are made destitute, and oftentimes with a wantonness and barbarism scarcely credible in a civilized nation. The wayside is becoming shadeless, and another generation will behold spots, now rife with beauty, desecrated by what is called improvement; which, as yet, generally destroys Nature’s beauty without substituting that of Art.

In a journal entry written the same year, Cole opined: “If men were not blind and insensible to the beauty of nature the great works necessary for the purpose of commerce might be carried on without destroying it, and at times might even contribute to her charms by rendering her more accessible—but it is not so—they desecrate whatever they touch. They cut down the forests with a wantonness for which there is no excuse . . . and leave the herbless rocks to glimmer in the burning sun.”4 Thomas Cole, “Essay on American Scenery,” American Monthly Magazine 7 (January 1836): 12. Cole’s journal is quoted in Alan C. Braddock and Christoph Irmscher, eds., A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009), 92–93. For the first instance of “ecology” (as Oecologie), see Ernst Haeckel, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (Berlin: Reimer, 1866), 286. See also Astrid Schwarz and Kurt Jax, eds., Ecology Revisited: Reflecting on Concepts, Advancing Science (New York: Springer, 2011), 145–53; and Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 191–93.

In the catalog of a recent exhibition organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, curator Elizabeth Kornhauser argued that environmental concerns about deforestation informed not only the artist’s writings but also his paintings, most notably The Oxbow. According to Kornhauser, this painting “embodied the profound moral message presented in his essay [that is, the “Essay on American Scenery”]—an artist’s manifesto to the American public to preserve the wilderness.” The picture articulated that message compositionally through its obvious structural opposition of sublime wilderness, seen at left, and picturesque agricultural domestication at right, but also through the telling detail of clear-cuttings on the distant mountainside in the background—visible above the tiny detail of the artist’s self-portrait, shown seated on the foreground mountainside, painting a landscape in progress (fig. 2).5 Elizabeth Kornhauser, “Manifesto for an American Sublime,” in Kornhauser and Barringer, Thomas Cole’s Journey, 78.

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Fig. 2. Thomas Cole, View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow, 1836 (detail). Oil on canvas, 51 1/2 × 76 in. (130.8 × 193 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Clearing and cultivation of river lowlands was one thing, but the encroachment of deforestation on mountains signaled for Cole a particularly disturbing incursion of development into a wilderness precinct that for him distinguished the United States from Europe. As he noted in another passage of his essay, “American mountains are generally clothed to the summit by dense forests, while those of Europe are mostly bare.” In other words, for Cole, mountain deforestation threatened to erode the difference between the New World and the Old. This helps explain why mountain deforestation functioned as a kind of leitmotif in his work, one that appeared in other paintings as well, including View of Hoosac Mountain and Pontoosuc Lake near Pittsfield, Massachusetts (fig. 3) and in a famous detail of Consummation, the pivotal work in his celebrated five-part allegory The Course of Empire (1834–36, New-York Historical Society), in which a formerly untouched peak, now thoroughly cleared, supports roads and buildings of various kinds (fig. 4).6 Cole, “Essay on American Scenery,” 5; Kornhauser, “Manifesto for an American Sublime,” 74–75, 204–19.

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Description: View of Hoosac Mountain and Pontoosuc Lake near Pittsfield, Massachusetts by Cole,...

Fig. 3. Thomas Cole, View of Hoosac Mountain and Pontoosuc Lake near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, ca. 1833. Oil on canvas, 33 1/4 × 45 1/2 in. (84.5 × 115.6 cm). Newark Museum, New Jersey

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Description: The Course of Empire: Consummation, detail by Cole, Thomas

Fig. 4. Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: Consummation, 1835–36 (detail). Oil on canvas, 51 1/4 × 76 in. (130.2 × 193 cm). New-York Historical Society, New York

COLE AND DIRECTIONALITY

With this leitmotif of mountain deforestation in mind, I would like to revisit The Oxbow in order to consider other aspects of its environmental significance, specifically having to do with the directionality of vision and implied lateral movement in the picture (see fig. 1). This painting very much asks the viewer to think about directions. For one thing, its title refers to a “view from Mount Holyoke,” indicating a specific topography of looking. The title also identifies a moment “after a thunderstorm,” instructing us to consider the movement of meteorological phenomena passing from right to left, a direction strongly implied by the leftward tilt of the large foreground tree, echoed by the angle of the mountainside and the Connecticut River below. Some scholars have found ambiguity in the implied lateral direction of the storm’s movement, but as Kornhauser correctly observes in the Metropolitan exhibition catalog, Cole’s self-portrait in the foreground shows him working on a canvas that is well under way, strongly suggesting that he has been sitting in clear weather for some time, “after” the titular thunderstorm’s passage offstage toward the left.7 On ambiguity, see Angela Miller, The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825–1875 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 47–48. For a corrective, see Kornhauser, “Manifesto for an American Sublime,” 79.

The directionality of implied movement in The Oxbow has also spawned considerable scholarly discussion about the painting’s allegorical significance as a vision of encounter between wilderness—embodied in the mountain forest at left—and countervailing forces of development or civilization—represented by the agricultural landscape at the right. For example, the art historian Angela Miller has said, “The subject of Cole’s Oxbow is the confrontation between wilderness and the colonizing energies of American agriculture at a particular moment in history.” According to Tim Barringer, “The tide of history is, it seems, moving inexorably from right to left, from East to West: the forest is destined to be swept away and the land brought under mankind’s rational control.” Likewise, in a Washington Post review of the Metropolitan exhibition, Philip Kennicott reiterated this assertion, including the reference to cardinal directions, saying, “The sharp division in the picture, roughly corresponding to east and west on a map, dramatizes the march of cultivation and the loss of wilderness.”8 Miller, Empire of the Eye, 40; Tim Barringer, “The Course of Empires: Landscape and Identity in America and Britain, 1820–1880,” in Andrew Wilton and Tim Barringer, American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States, 1820–1880 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press in association with the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 2002), 40; Philip Kennicott, “Did America’s Great Landscape Painter Fear Progress and Hate Democracy?” Washington Post, February 2, 2018.

While the general idea of The Oxbow presenting a bifurcated encounter between wilderness and civilization is correct, the notion that the picture corresponds to cartographic conventions of right = East and left = West is erroneous. As anyone can attest by being there (or by consulting Google Earth), viewing the oxbow-shaped curve of the Connecticut River from Skinner State Park at the top of Mount Holyoke requires looking southwest (fig. 5). Cole’s picture reproduces this view downriver. Therefore, the storm he depicted moving from right to left is moving from west to east, not east to west. Kornhauser, in correctly identifying the direction of our gaze in the painting, is one of the few scholars who has bothered to mention this fact, even though the artist’s title for the work—View from Mount Holyoke—clearly invites such topographical considerations. One of the only other scholars to make this correct assessment of the picture’s directionality is the environmental historian William Cronon, who in 1992 wrote, “It is important to realize that the viewer in this painting is looking south, so that one’s ordinary association of right and left with east and west are here reversed. This is the only way to know that the painting captures the end of the storm, and that the golden light flooding in upon the scene comes from a setting, western, sun.”9 Kornhauser, “Manifesto for an American Sublime,” 74; William Cronon, “Telling Tales on Canvas: Landscapes of Frontier Change,” in Discovered Lands, Invented Pasts: Transforming Visions of the American West, ed. Jules David Prown (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 198 n. 3.

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Description: Map of the Oxbow, Connecticut River, West of Skinner State Park (on Mount Holyoke),...

Fig. 5. Map of the Oxbow, Connecticut River, West of Skinner State Park (on Mount Holyoke), Massachusetts

Cronon does not say anything more about the significance of this “ordinary association of right and left with east and west,” but it deserves scrutiny for the rich cultural baggage it carries. Contemporary maps of the United States testify to the prevailing cartographic conventions in America when Cole painted The Oxbow (fig. 6). In addition to locating the East predictably at right, such maps rendered the continent as an abstract space available for westward colonization, defined by mathematically delineated longitudes and latitudes, consistent with the nation’s influential Land Ordinance of 1785, which established a system for partitioning parcels of property to be settled according to an emphatically east-west pattern of directionality. That Cole’s Oxbow reversed the “ordinary association of right and left with east and west” therefore distinguishes his work from the many American maps and pictures that embraced such directional logic in the era of Manifest Destiny.10 On the Land Ordinance of 1785 and its legacy, see Hildegard Binder Johnson, Order upon the Land: The U.S. Rectangular Land Survey and the Upper Mississippi Country (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). See also Weems, Barnstorming the Prairies, xx, 11, 16–18, 61–64, 125, 194, 231, 261.

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Description: Map of the United States of America with its Territories & Districts

Fig. 6. B. B. Barber and A. Willard, Map of the United States of America with its Territories & Districts (Hartford, 1835). Printed map, 27 15/16 × 42 1/2 in. (71 × 108 cm). David Rumsey Map Collection, Stanford University

For example, William Jewett’s Promised Land of 1850 portrayed the pioneer family of Andrew Jackson Grayson (1819–1869) on their trek through the Sierra Nevada to San Francisco and the Gold Rush (fig. 7). The Graysons had completed their journey to California in 1846, not long after journalist John O’Sullivan famously declared, “Our manifest destiny is to overspread the continent allotted by providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” With its exhilarating westward view of the Sacramento River valley bathed in gold at left, The Promised Land echoes O’Sullivan’s expansive sense of divine providence, imperial entitlement, and optimism. Jewett’s picture also helped institutionalize in art the cartographic logic of right and left as east and west.11 John O’Sullivan, “Annexation,” United States Magazine and Democratic Review 17 (1845): 5. On Jewett’s Promised Land, see Patricia Hills, “Picturing Progress in the Era of Westward Expansion,” in The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820–1920, ed. William H. Truettner (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 97–100. For a brief discussion of Jewett’s picture that overstates its “environmental overtones,” see Peter John Brownlee, Manifest Destiny / Manifest Responsibility: Environmentalism and the Art of the American Landscape (Chicago: Terra Foundation for American Art in association with Loyola University Museum of Art, 2008), 27.

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Description: The Promised Land–The Grayson Family by Jewett, William Smith

Fig. 7. William S. Jewett, The Promised Land—The Grayson Family, 1850. Oil on canvas, 50 7/8 × 65 in. (128.9 × 162.6 cm). Terra Foundation for American Art

The art historian Roger Aikin has noted how the same leftward directionality appears frequently in American pictures of westward movement during the second half of the nineteenth century. As Aikin observes, “It is difficult to find any depiction of American westward expansion, or ‘progress,’ in high art or popular illustrations that does not feature strong right-to-left, or ‘westward,’ movement.” While not an absolute rule, this cartographic correlation does seem to be a recognizable tendency. It also appears in Emanuel Leutze’s Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, painted in 1861 for the U.S. Capitol, showing another group of pioneers traversing mountains on their way to a golden California at left (fig. 8). Albert Bierstadt’s Oregon Trail of 1869 depicts settlers in a wagon train accompanied by domestic animals, passing by bleached buffalo bones and Native American tipis in the same direction (fig. 9). Photographs and magazine illustrations likewise represent “East” and “West” metaphorically shaking hands at the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 (fig. 10). And perhaps the most recognizable example of all, John Gast’s American Progress of 1873—an oil painting widely reproduced as a chromolithograph—displays a mythic female personification of Euro-American enlightenment floating across the North American continent from right to left, stringing telegraph wires and accompanied by various other avatars of Manifest Destiny (fig. 11).12 Roger Aikin, “Paintings of Manifest Destiny: Mapping the Nation,” American Art 14, no. 3 (2000): 80. For more discussion of Gast’s American Progress, see Alan C. Braddock, “‘Man and Nature’: Visualizing Human Impacts,” in Karl Kusserow and Alan C. Braddock, Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Art Museum in association with Yale University Press, 2018), 201; Hills, “Picturing Progress,” 134–36.

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Description: Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way by Leutze, Emanuel Gottlieb

Fig. 8. Emanuel Leutze, Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way, 1862. Stereochrome mural, 20 × 30 ft. (6.1 × 9.1 m). House Wing, West Stairway, U.S. Capitol, Washington, D.C.

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Description: The Oregon Trail by Bierstadt, Albert

Fig. 9. Albert Bierstadt, The Oregon Trail, 1869. Oil on canvas, 31 × 49 in. (78.7 × 124.5 cm). Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio

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Description: Does Not Such a Meeting make Amends? by Beard, Frank

Fig. 10. Frank Beard, "Does Not Such a Meeting make Amends?" Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, May 29, 1869

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Description: American Progress by Crofutt, George A.

Fig. 11. George A. Croffut after John Gast, American Progress, 1873. Chromolithograph, 14 13/16 × 19 5/16 in. (37.6 × 49 cm). Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Cole certainly knew about the forces of social and environmental change that were already sweeping across the nation by the 1830s, but he did not follow cartographic logic in representing them. In fact, he often located the East at the left of his compositions, not just in The Oxbow but in many other works as well. For example, in View of the Round-Top in the Catskill Mountains (Sunny Morning on the Hudson River) the morning light of the East shines from left to right (fig. 12). The same orientation informs The Savage State and all the pictures in The Course of Empire, in which the artist equated dawn metaphorically with the earliest stage in the development of civilization. In a late work of 1843, offering a view of Mount Etna in Sicily looking south from the ancient Greek ruins at Taormina, eastern morning light again floods the scene from the left (fig. 13). By no means was Cole entirely consistent about this correlation between left and East, however. In his View of Florence (1837), for example, we look across the famous Renaissance Italian city from the East toward the West, our eyes following the path of the Arno River toward the setting sun at the far left (fig. 14).13 Kornhauser and Barringer, Thomas Cole’s Journey, 135, 191, 206, 256.

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Description: View of the Round-Top in the Catskill Mountains (Sunny Morning on the Hudson River)...

Fig. 12. Thomas Cole, View of the Round-Top in the Catskill Mountains (Sunny Morning on the Hudson River), 1827. Oil on panel, 18 5/8 × 25 3/8 in. (47.31 × 64.45 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

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Description: Mount Etna from Taormina by Cole, Thomas

Fig. 13. Thomas Cole, Mount Etna from Taormina, 1843. Oil on canvas, 78 5/8 × 120 5/8 in. (199.8 × 206.4 cm). Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut

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Description: View of Florence by Cole, Thomas

Fig. 14. Thomas Cole, View of Florence, 1837. Oil on canvas, 39 3/16 × 63 1/8 in. (99.5 × 160.4 cm). Cleveland Museum of Art

VERTICALITY

In contrast to the cartographic orientation evident in many later nineteenth-century American pictures of progress and environmental change, The Oxbow and other works by Cole defied any predictable cardinal directionality. Could this have something to do with his roots in Europe, where different historical patterns of land acquisition prevailed that were less emphatically directional than America’s East-West flow of national settlement and continental conquest? Perhaps, but instead of speculating on this large and complex cross-cultural question, I will return to a statement by Cole that I quoted earlier regarding the specific directionality of forests. As Cole had written, “American mountains are generally clothed to the summit by dense forests, while those of Europe are mostly bare.” The directional orientation of this statement is neither lateral nor cardinal but rather vertical. That is, it frames environmental concern about forests in terms of elevation as opposed to longitude or latitude. Cole’s interest in geology broadly echoed that of Alexander von Humboldt, the famous Prussian naturalist, so it is intriguing to contemplate the possibility that the painter may have known about the scientist’s inquiries concerning isothermal lines of plant and tree growth at different elevations. However, the statement quoted here from Cole’s “Essay” clearly refers to human impacts on forest growth rather than Humboldtian isothermal lines.14 Cole, “Essay on American Scenery,” 5. On Cole and Humboldt, see Kornhauser, “Manifesto for an American Sublime,” 71–72, 92, 95.

Cole’s observation about “American mountains . . . generally clothed to the summit by dense forests” corroborates the findings of a historical statistical study published in the Journal of Biogeography. In “Three Hundred Years of Forest and Land-Use Change in Massachusetts,” researchers used historical tax evaluations, agricultural census records, and geographic information systems to track changes in forest composition, structure, and distribution across Massachusetts from the early years of European settlement to the present. According to the authors,

Much of the eastern USA was cleared for cultivation or grazing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. . . . The Connecticut River Valley and the central part of the Lower Worcester Plateau were also settled relatively early because of the rich, easily tilled soils, abundant freshwater meadow grass, and history of use by Native Americans. . . . Agriculture generally peaked between 1830 and 1885 . . . c. 50% of the land was pasture, hay, or cultivated fields. . . . Forest cover reached a nadir during the mid-nineteenth century. . . . Woodlands were most common in 1830 on poor agricultural lands such as mountains.

In other words, around the time Cole painted The Oxbow, farm-related deforestation had radically reduced forest cover in Massachusetts, with mountains providing one of the last refuges for “woodlands,” or dense areas of tree growth, in the region. A particularly striking graphic in the scientific study compares forest cover in 1830 and 1999, revealing, as the authors explain, “large portions of the region supporting greater forest cover today than at any time in the past 200 years” (fig. 15). A visit to the Oxbow site confirms this transformation; many more trees line the river today than in the artist’s view of 1836 (fig. 16). On the other hand, as the researchers point out, the composition of Massachusetts forests has also changed dramatically over time: old-growth oaks, beeches, and hemlocks have largely been replaced by the secondary growth of short-lived maples and pines. The prominent old tree with broken branches and fungus in the left foreground of The Oxbow—possibly a beech or birch but perhaps purposely generalized—suggests Cole’s poignant appreciation of such venerable denizens of the forest.15 Brian Hall, Glenn Motzkin, David R. Foster, Mindy Syfert, and John Burk, “Three Hundred Years of Forest and Land-Use Change in Massachusetts, USA,” Journal of Biogeography 29 (2002): 1320, 1323, 1324, 1325. I thank Brian Hall and his colleagues David Foster, Glenn Motzkin, and Neil Pederson at Harvard Forest for fielding my inquiry about the tree that appears in the left foreground of Cole’s Oxbow.

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Description: Massachusetts forest cover in 1830 (a); and (b) 1999 (MassGIS, 2002)

Fig. 15. Brian Hall, Massachusetts forest cover in 1830 (a) and 1999 (b) (MassGIS, 2002), from Hall et al., “Three hundred years of forest and land-use change in Massachusetts, USA,” Journal of Biogeography 29 (2002): 1324, fig. 6

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Description: The Oxbow by Strahan, Derek

Fig. 16. Derek Strahan, The Oxbow, 2015. https://lostnewengland.com/2015/06/the-oxbow-from-mount-holyoke-hadley-mass/

POLITICAL ECOLOGY

Ecocritical art history can obviously benefit from interdisciplinary research in environmental history and science, but important political matters come into play here as well. After all, not everyone experiences an environment in the same way, either now or in the past. Ecological relationships and perceptions are intrinsically political because they entail complex and often contested interactions, not to mention multiple directions of vision and communication. In the case of Cole, for example, the politics of Indian removal clearly informed his romantic idealism about nature. As Tim Barringer has noted, Cole viewed Native Americans as stereotypical props in a grand moral narrative that celebrated pure, untouched wilderness against the encroachment of modern civilization. In Kaaterskill Falls (1826), the artist erased all signs of modern tourism, but he inserted a tiny, solitary figure of a Native American standing on a ledge in the center, a primordial human emblem of the pristine natural surroundings (fig. 17).16 On Cole’s representation of Native Americans, see Barringer, “Thomas Cole’s Atlantic Crossings,” 53, 56; and Vernon Scott Dimond, “‘Eloquent Representatives’: A Study of the Native American Figure in the Early Landscape of Thomas Cole, 1825–1830” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1998). For discussion of Kaaterskill Falls, see Kornhauser, “Manifesto for an American Sublime,” 68–71.

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Description: The Falls of Kaaterskill by Cole, Thomas

Fig. 17. Thomas Cole, Kaaterskill Falls, 1826. Oil on canvas, 43 × 36 in. (109.2 × 91.4 cm). Private collection

The Oxbow performed similar erasures by discreetly editing out the visual evidence of tourist structures and traffic at the site—phenomena acknowledged by other artists at the time. For example, a lithograph by William Bartlett illustrating Nathaniel Parker Willis’s book American Scenery (1840) shows picnickers near a building in a parklike setting atop Mount Holyoke with the Oxbow unfurling below, as in Cole’s painting (fig. 18). In addition to identifying the scene, Willis described the long colonial history of conflict between White settlers and Native Americans in this very region:

The early history of all these towns on the Connecticut river is filled with events of Indian warfare. Northampton, by its rich alluvial land allured the first settlers of Massachusetts long before most of the country between it and the sea-coast possessed an inhabitant. These adventurous pilgrims seated themselves in the midst of an unprotected wilderness, and surrounded by populous Indian tribes; and, first purchasing the land at the Indians’ valuation, they defended themselves afterwards as they might from the aggressions of these and others. The township of Northampton (called Nonotuc by the aborigines) was first bought in 1653. . . . The settlers of Nonotuc lived in comparative harmony with the tribe about them; but in the subsequent Indian wars they lived in perpetual fear and agitation. The town was surrounded with palisades, “the meeting-house” was fortified, as were most of the private houses, and several forts were built within the town. Still their dwellings were often burnt, their women and children carried into captivity, and their time was divided between war and agriculture.17 Nathaniel Parker Willis, American Scenery; or, Land, Lake, and River / Illustrations of Transatlantic Nature, vol. 1 (London: George Vertue, 1840), 11.

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Description: View from Mount Holyoke by Bartlett, William Henry

Fig 18. William Bartlett, View from Mount Holyoke. Lithograph published in Nathaniel Parker Willis, “American Scenery: or, Land, Lake, and River/Illustrations of Transatlantic Nature,” London: George Vertue 1840, vol. 1, p. 10

During the seventeenth century, English colonists rapidly expanded into the area historically inhabited by various Algonquian-speaking tribes, including the Wampanoags, whose chief, Metacom (1638–1676), or King Philip, eventually waged war against the invaders. Metacom’s Rebellion, also known as King Philip’s War, was the deadliest war in the history of North American colonial settlement, resulting in the death of thousands, mostly Indigenous people, over several years during the 1670s. Cole’s Oxbow did not represent any of this regional history or the recent tourist infrastructure. Instead, his painting offered a gratifying illusion of primeval mountain forest, where the artist and kindred spirits could rise above both history and environmental change. For all of his directional specificity and resistance to the prevailing visual dynamics of Manifest Destiny in nineteenth-century American landscape imagery, Cole’s work ultimately naturalized the idea of pristine wilderness at the expense of politics and history.18 Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Vintage, 1999).

Cole’s dream of an uncompromised, unspoiled wilderness also therefore ends up compromising his environmentalism. Ecology demands critical examination of interconnections of all kinds—including symbiosis, coexistence, and conflict—not obfuscation, purification, and erasure. This is the basic point of the recent withering critiques of both “wilderness” and the “nature” concept long cherished within the tradition exemplified by Cole. Unfortunately, as the many authors of this critique have now told us, romantic representations of wilderness tend to aestheticize nature as an impossible utopian realm of purity and historical amnesia, cleansed of politics, difference, and change. Ecocritical art history counters such idealism by excavating complexity in aesthetic objects and environmental history, whether beautiful or contested.19 Ramachandra Guha, “Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique,” Environmental Ethics 11 (Spring 1989): 71–83; William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 69–90; Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009); Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010); Steven Vogel, Thinking Like a Mall: Environmental Philosophy after the End of Nature (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2015).

I close with a very different work by Thomas Cole: his fossil and rock collection (fig. 19). This assemblage provides interesting evidence of the artist’s willingness to accept complexity and difference, to some extent, regardless of directionality and without illusions of wilderness. The collection consists of “natural” fossils and rocks but also various modern and ancient human artifacts, including medallions, fragments of mosaic, an oil lamp, and the heads of figurines. By combining objects of human and nonhuman antiquity, Cole here imagined a somewhat more comprehensive, environmental view of the past. We still sense no political conflict, but unlike the elusive purity that he imagined and valorized atop Mount Holyoke, his collection of fossils embraced some of the messy mesh of history.20 On Cole’s fossil collection, see Kornhauser, “Manifesto for an American Sublime,” 72.

~

Description: Thomas Cole's fossil and rock collection by Cole, Thomas

Fig. 19. Thomas Cole's fossil and rock collection, ca. 1830–40. Thomas Cole National Historic Site, Catskill, New York

Epigraph: “directionality, n.,” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2022, www.oed.com/view/Entry/53303.

1 The scholarship on Thomas Cole is enormous. For recent discussions, see Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser and Tim Barringer, Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2018); Tim Barringer, Picturesque and Sublime: Thomas Cole’s Trans-Atlantic Inheritance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018); and Annette Blaugrund, Franklin Kelly, and Barbara Novak, Thomas Cole: The Artist as Architect (New York: Monacelli, 2016). For an important earlier study, see William H. Truettner and Alan Wallach, Thomas Cole: Landscape into History (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art in association with Yale University Press, 1994). On the history of the Midwest, see Kristin L. Hoganson, The Heartland: An American History (New York: Penguin, 2020); and Nicole Etcheson, The Emerging Midwest: Upland Southerners and the Political Culture of the Old Northwest, 1787–1861 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996). See also Jon K. Lauck, Gleaves Whitney, and Joseph Hogan, eds., Finding a New Midwestern History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020); and Jason Weems, Barnstorming the Prairies: How Aerial Vision Shaped the Midwest (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). »

2 Scott Slovic, “Ecocriticism: Storytelling, Values, Communication, Contact,” in Going Away to Think: Engagement, Retreat, and Ecocritical Responsibility (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2008). See also Scott Slovic, Swarnalatha Rangarajan, and Vidya Sarveswaran, eds., Routledge Handbook of Ecocriticism and Environmental Communication (New York: Routledge, 2019). »

3 On Cole’s early years, see Tim Barringer, “Thomas Cole’s Atlantic Crossings,” in Kornhauser and Barringer, Thomas Cole’s Journey, 19–61. See also the early biography by Louis Legrand Noble, The Course of Empire: Voyage of Life, and Other Pictures of Thomas Cole, N.A., with Selections from His Letters and Miscellaneous Writings; Illustrative of His Life, Character, and Genius (New York: Cornish, Lamport, 1853). For information about the Erie Canal and the development of New York, see Catherine Hoover Voorsanger and John K. Howat, eds., Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825–1861 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013), 3–4, 9, 10, 19, 25, 44, 109–14, 123, 18–90, 227, 287–88, 327, 331, 355, 361; and Gerard Koeppel, Bond of Union: Building the Erie Canal and the American Empire (New York: DaCapo, 2010). »

4 Thomas Cole, “Essay on American Scenery,” American Monthly Magazine 7 (January 1836): 12. Cole’s journal is quoted in Alan C. Braddock and Christoph Irmscher, eds., A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009), 92–93. For the first instance of “ecology” (as Oecologie), see Ernst Haeckel, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (Berlin: Reimer, 1866), 286. See also Astrid Schwarz and Kurt Jax, eds., Ecology Revisited: Reflecting on Concepts, Advancing Science (New York: Springer, 2011), 145–53; and Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 191–93. »

5 Elizabeth Kornhauser, “Manifesto for an American Sublime,” in Kornhauser and Barringer, Thomas Cole’s Journey, 78. »

6 Cole, “Essay on American Scenery,” 5; Kornhauser, “Manifesto for an American Sublime,” 74–75, 204–19. »

7 On ambiguity, see Angela Miller, The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825–1875 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 47–48. For a corrective, see Kornhauser, “Manifesto for an American Sublime,” 79. »

8 Miller, Empire of the Eye, 40; Tim Barringer, “The Course of Empires: Landscape and Identity in America and Britain, 1820–1880,” in Andrew Wilton and Tim Barringer, American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States, 1820–1880 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press in association with the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 2002), 40; Philip Kennicott, “Did America’s Great Landscape Painter Fear Progress and Hate Democracy?” Washington Post, February 2, 2018. »

9 Kornhauser, “Manifesto for an American Sublime,” 74; William Cronon, “Telling Tales on Canvas: Landscapes of Frontier Change,” in Discovered Lands, Invented Pasts: Transforming Visions of the American West, ed. Jules David Prown (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 198 n. 3. »

10 On the Land Ordinance of 1785 and its legacy, see Hildegard Binder Johnson, Order upon the Land: The U.S. Rectangular Land Survey and the Upper Mississippi Country (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). See also Weems, Barnstorming the Prairies, xx, 11, 16–18, 61–64, 125, 194, 231, 261. »

11 John O’Sullivan, “Annexation,” United States Magazine and Democratic Review 17 (1845): 5. On Jewett’s Promised Land, see Patricia Hills, “Picturing Progress in the Era of Westward Expansion,” in The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820–1920, ed. William H. Truettner (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 97–100. For a brief discussion of Jewett’s picture that overstates its “environmental overtones,” see Peter John Brownlee, Manifest Destiny / Manifest Responsibility: Environmentalism and the Art of the American Landscape (Chicago: Terra Foundation for American Art in association with Loyola University Museum of Art, 2008), 27. »

12 Roger Aikin, “Paintings of Manifest Destiny: Mapping the Nation,” American Art 14, no. 3 (2000): 80. For more discussion of Gast’s American Progress, see Alan C. Braddock, “‘Man and Nature’: Visualizing Human Impacts,” in Karl Kusserow and Alan C. Braddock, Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Art Museum in association with Yale University Press, 2018), 201; Hills, “Picturing Progress,” 134–36. »

13 Kornhauser and Barringer, Thomas Cole’s Journey, 135, 191, 206, 256. »

14 Cole, “Essay on American Scenery,” 5. On Cole and Humboldt, see Kornhauser, “Manifesto for an American Sublime,” 71–72, 92, 95. »

15 Brian Hall, Glenn Motzkin, David R. Foster, Mindy Syfert, and John Burk, “Three Hundred Years of Forest and Land-Use Change in Massachusetts, USA,” Journal of Biogeography 29 (2002): 1320, 1323, 1324, 1325. I thank Brian Hall and his colleagues David Foster, Glenn Motzkin, and Neil Pederson at Harvard Forest for fielding my inquiry about the tree that appears in the left foreground of Cole’s Oxbow. »

16 On Cole’s representation of Native Americans, see Barringer, “Thomas Cole’s Atlantic Crossings,” 53, 56; and Vernon Scott Dimond, “‘Eloquent Representatives’: A Study of the Native American Figure in the Early Landscape of Thomas Cole, 1825–1830” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1998). For discussion of Kaaterskill Falls, see Kornhauser, “Manifesto for an American Sublime,” 68–71. »

17 Nathaniel Parker Willis, American Scenery; or, Land, Lake, and River / Illustrations of Transatlantic Nature, vol. 1 (London: George Vertue, 1840), 11. »

18 Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Vintage, 1999). »

19 Ramachandra Guha, “Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique,” Environmental Ethics 11 (Spring 1989): 71–83; William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 69–90; Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009); Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010); Steven Vogel, Thinking Like a Mall: Environmental Philosophy after the End of Nature (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2015). »

20 On Cole’s fossil collection, see Kornhauser, “Manifesto for an American Sublime,” 72. »

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