View from Mount Holyoke

Thomas Cole painted this in the winter of 1835–36 for the spring exhibition of the National Academy of Design in New York. He took it on as relief from The Course of Empire, a demanding five-painting commission for the merchant Luman Reed that had left him worn down; he told Reed he would paint a view from Mount Holyoke because it was the finest scene in his sketchbook. Cole was born in Bolton, Lancashire, in 1801 and emigrated with his family to the United States at seventeen, so the painter usually called the founder of American landscape art was himself English. In 1829 he sailed back to England for two years, saw John Constable's work at the Royal Academy and became his friend, and called at the London studio of J. M. W. Turner; from Constable he took up the oil sketch, the practice of working directly from the landscape that lies behind pictures like this one. Back in New York he argued that American wilderness deserved the seriousness European painters reserved for history and myth, and the loose group of painters who followed him became known as the Hudson River School. In 1844 he accepted his first pupil, the eighteen-year-old Frederic Edwin Church, and taught him at Catskill for two years; Church went on to become the most celebrated American landscape painter of the next generation. Cole died at Catskill in 1848, aged forty-seven.