Thomas Cole’s Double View of Mount Holyoke

Abstract

When Thomas Cole first unpacked his easel in the Catskill Mountains, and began to paint the scenes that would make him America’s most influential landscape artist, there was still a close relationship between the United States and Britain. Though the War of 1812 was a bitter conflict regarding all remaining British claims to North America, it had ended in stalemate a decade earlier and neither side was in the mood for another war. Instead, the two countries had agreed to an ongoing series of negotiations to settle their differences. Comity and compromise were the order of the day. Coincidentally, so was landscape painting. Artists such as John Constable and J.M.W. Turner were just the latest lights in what was already, in Ann Bermingham’s words, a ‘golden age of English landscape painting’ that began with Thomas Gainsborough.1 Could anything be more inspiring to a painter like Cole...