Thomas Cole’s Catskills

you [Music] good afternoon everyone it's a great pleasure to be back here welcoming such a huge attending audience for whatever John Walsh speaks it's it's amazing and now after three years of delivering fantastic lectures on his great subject of the paintings of the great Dutch Golden Age John is venturing into another area of his expertise one you may not know about because when John was at Columbia after being a graduate of Yale in 1961 the he of course became a great expert got his PhD in Dutch art but what maybe some of you don't know was that he also did a master's thesis under Barbara Novak on the subject of Winslow Homer so it becomes no surprise to us that he's here with a new series this series called American viewpoints and manipulations views of six great paintings that reside in the Yale Art Gallery's collection John's gone to the sites of these paintings he spent time where the artists painted them looked at how they've composed these compositions thought ganda their studios when possible and taking notes and he's going to give you a really interesting perspective each lecture on one painting this of course coincides with Grant Jones great teaching with us where he comes in and works with our graduate and undergraduate students and what we call close and slow looking everything's going a little too fast nowadays and there's too much information age but those who come to the art gallery and partake in the yoga education where we could slow down and consider what it takes to make a great painter sculpture really learned something that John's been an exemplar as you know he was the director emeritus of the Jay paul Getty Museum this was the largest construction project undertaken in all America 1.3 billion compared to our modest little pop enterprise here John did that from 1983 to the year 2000 17 years he's been on this governing board 40 years the last 20 of which he has constantly come here generously to help us balance our educational mission with our collection mission and in a wonderful way and we can't get enough of him and we also have to thank Jill Walsh's devoted loving wife who just arrived Wednesday night and continues to encourage them to come ah John and a half and say we both married women way beyond our equal and and boy do we know it so the the other thing I want to say is that this lecture series is also one that's going to continue and it's going to continue in a very interesting new way and I want to talk about an opportunity we're gonna make open to all of you from now on up until now if you noticed everything time you come to the Yale art gallery it's totally free there's no $25 ticket price there's no price for anything we do all the things that make this place happen or voluntary private donations and one of the things that's happened with this lecture over the last three and a half years is we've done something for the knowledge being transmitted by great professors such as John and I'll be just harken back to someone else he was legendary Yale Vincent Scully all the years Vincent Scully lecture if you were to talk to the students who took his courses in this auditorium and the other older one they would say the lectures changed their lives the sad thing is is when you back and look at Vince's earliest video graph video to lectures you can see him here at the podium but you look at the screen that looks at screen it looks like oatmeal the image is never transmitted to that format to be recorded so you hear his voice and tapes but you never see the coordination of image to voice that we've been able to do with the Walsh lectures over three years and then put them on YouTube and I'm looking at Rick Levin who's sitting here ahead of Coursera to make these completely free and available all over the world I think the lies count 50 60 thousand people it seemed seemed John's Dutch lectures so as you leave today you're gonna get a little brochure from us and it's gonna say thank you John Walsh in it you all have an opportunity only if you want me to make a donation of any kind to what's gonna become a new John Walsh lecture and education found one that allow such lectures like this to continue deep deep into the future and I'm often reminded perpetuity is a long time so well beyond our time we want this kind of lecturing and this kind of knowledge to just keep moving along the paintings and the works of art stay the same but the knowledge transmitted to our students into audiences like yours don't always remain the same and this we can keep moving them digitally forward so I got to tell you I had the easiest fundraising of my life I decided I just start this thing off with I think I called seven people already have six hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars committed to this project so that's that's not to pressure any of you because you'll see on this you'll see in this brochure you can make donation from a single figure on up to whatever you're comfortable with but I think I know enough of you out there does know that you're going to want to participate and how wonderful would be to have a lecture fund that's crowd-sourced in a way that's never been done here at Yale so without further ado John Walsh Jacques that was a lot of adieu I'm afraid perpetuity is not going to apply to me but I envy anybody who gets to come and talk to this audience this is the best audience I've ever had in my life I've said that to you all before it's true well as John told you in this series we're going to look at six paintings across a century each of them depicting a particular place in each of the pictures the artist alters the appearance of the place which is evident when you compare it with what the place really looked like and consider what the painting map made out of it I'm interested in why changes like that are made and what they accomplished that a straightforward view can't have so that's the thread I've strung onto the thread some of Yale's most important American paintings each of them with its own attraction its own circumstances that I'll also explore with you this picture by Thomas Cole hangs in the same room with three other landscapes that are in this series by church Gifford and Bierce Todd they're part of the handsome reinstallation that mark Mitchell and Keeley argument did last summer so I hope you'll try to spend some unhurried times slowly looking in the coming weeks looking at these pictures meanwhile let's take a few minutes with the Kohl painting of North Mountain and Catskill Creek of 1838 look Catskill Creek flows into the Hudson at Catskill New York about two hours drive from New York City or in Cole's time a day's travel by steamboat he had been living there for several years it's the first of six pictures at least using the same motifs that he painted during the last ten years of his life so I'm going to use it to open up a discussion of Cole's work in particular what he chose to represent and how and where his imagery came from here we see a wide river big trees right up to the banks and a few people beyond the bend in the distance there are woods and in the far distance the blue gray silhouette of mountains on the left the clouds have swollen up into big heads of cumulus there are smaller flatter clouds at higher altitudes on the right side bright light comes from the low Sun it's out of sight the clouds are rosy pink the water is calm and mirrors the sky at the far right edge you could just make out a cabin by the river with an open door it's not a farmhouse it's not a barn but a simple log building more like a camp the man on horseback lets his mount drink while he waves to somebody with his habit and that greeting may be intended for the man who's rowing a boat returning with a load of leafy branches why branches you might wonder maybe for some practical purpose like making a brush shelter or even making baskets back at camp there isn't any other labor going on in fact back in the distance at the very top very small are three men one of them swimming one getting dressed and one with what's probably a fishing rod the men are at leisure enjoying themselves they're far from any other sign of human life the painting invites us to observe the richness of it all the uncultivated gentle country beyond the river banks the refreshment that this place offers these men and the majesty of the high country in the distance as well as the towering clouds which at this moment anyway are more decorative than threatening there's a peace and harmony here that's not threatened by anything well you see one reason why painters and critics thought so highly of Cole if you'd look at how full of life the trees are how much variety and energy his brush strokes give the branches dead and alive and the leaves the birds circling above the treetops the strokes he use for those are all different you have the sense that what Cole saw in nature is all coming to you reenacted and believable we'll come back to this scene and other ones like it which Cole painted right up until his premature death ten years later in 1848 at the age of 47 they reveal his beliefs about nature and about passing time beliefs it meant a great deal to him and his admirers meanwhile who was Thomas Cole he was born in England and emigrated with his family at the age of 17 to the United States in 1818 he was from Bolton and Lancashire a cloth producing factory town and as a boy he was trained as a woodblock engraver for printed textiles Bolton was a grimy grim place known far and wide for the great labour rebellion that occurred while Cole was a teenager a factory workers attacked the new weaving machinery that was putting them out of work while it made the mill owners even richer the famous Lud Luddites name for their mythical leader Ned Ludd Cole grew up witnessing acute social injustice learning about corruption of the factory owners becoming more aware of the pollution of the land and the air in the water all of which must have inclined him to crave unspoiled nature here I want to say that I learned a lot about this subject last fall from the excellent lecture by Tim behringer in the new paul mellon series at the british art center about Cole's development and the lasting effects of his experiences in England as a video on their website and I couldn't recommend it more strongly tim's ideas in fact have shaped an exhibition that he's coordinate co-organized for the metropolitan called Thomas Cole's journey Atlantic crossing it opens at the end of January and goes on to the National Gallery in London Cole certainly didn't see much painting as a boy and Bolton but when he went to work for a years an engraver in Liverpool he must have studied landscape prints of some sort or another he did have an education and there was poetry to encourage him especially poems published during Cole's impressionable teenage years by John Keats poems full of yearning for escape from the city into pure unsullied nature his family came to Pittsburg first then to Ohio where he learned to paint his biographer William Dunlop writes about a spring day in 1823 a story that he certainly got from Cole himself and it gives a kind of mythic flavor to Dunlop writes the spring had arrived and the young painter seemed to awake to the beauties of natural of the nature in landscape he now began in 1823 to make studies from nature every morning before it was light he was on his way to the banks of the beautiful Mahoney and Monongahela with his papers and pencils he made small but accurate studies of single objects a tree the loofah leafless bow every ramification and twig was studied and as the season advanced he studied the foliage Nate clothed in its naked trees and by degrees attempted extensive scenes he'd now found the right path and what is most extraordinary he'd found the true mode of pursuing it well at the Pennsylvania Academy in Philadelphia Cole could see what contemporary American landscape looked like as practice that is by a handful of artists it was mild formulaic Joshua chose American landscape at the top could be anywhere especially in the English countryside the foreground is bracketed by trees and shrubs there's an expanse of calm water and beyond handsome mountains this is the face of cultivated nature with no scars or distinguishing marks it's all carefully arranged the young Cole would have learned where that for the worth formula for that kind of arrangement had come from came from Claude Laurent French expat in Rome in the 17th century this is on the bottom of the little painting up in the galleries by Claude he Claude didn't invent the formula other older artists in Rome had done that but he made it his own it came to embody the beautiful in quotations that is a category-2 defined in the 18th century for calm balanced often bucolic or pastoral scenes it was a formula that was passed down through generations of English artists Alvin Fischer's composition below has more going on a grove of trees that could belong to a stage set the obligatory water and rugged mountains he makes it more irregular more animated with a hint in the distance of really rugged nature a hint of what was then called the sublime as distinct from the beautiful this mixture beautiful and sublime was what artists came to call picturesque will return to the sublime in a moment well having settled in New York City with his family at eighteen a Kohl set up a studio in a narrow that badly lighted room an 1825 he made his first trip up the Hudson River to the Catskills this is one of the five pictures he showed very soon after his trip to the Catskills in a bookstore in a gallery in New York Cole was an unknown 24 year old Englishman so this is one of the most amazing debuts ever it's three feet wide a scene that is expansive is minutely detailed beautifully lighted and deeply strange the composition hues mostly to a picturesque formula but with some shocks for one thing there's no way to enter the scene before this American views were accessible there was a path or a road no obstacles here you could imagine yourself in those pictures you could imagine yourself walking in in this one there's a barrier of logs and branches and a couple of deer spooked by our arrival and stranger still all around the lake is death this ghostly palisade of dead trees it wasn't fire or disease that did that it happens when beavers create a dam and a moving water and raised the hot level high enough and for long enough to kill the closest trees which then stand dead for years now you actually see this in northern forests but not in any English or American landscapes before this coals painting is picturesque with an added shiver a reminder that death is in nature and if you penetrate deep enough into nature they preserve it absorb it truths about life and death are revealed to you this was the passionate belief of the transcendentalists in America Emerson in particular who wrote this the noblest ministry of nature is to stand as an apparition of God nature is the organ through which the human spirit speaks to the individual and strive to lead back the individual to it Cole's first catskill pictures sold two important buyers he'd made a debut that most artists could only dream of now on his sketching trip Cole had hiked in one area in particular the deep gorge called count erskyll clove which is fed by a couple of waterfalls here he's composed of view from the top of one of those Falls he puts the spectator that's us right at the abyss right at the edge of the water just as it disappears Cole introduces the element of time here the deep time of slow erosion that cut this notch into the rock the quicker time of the seasons that turn green leaves to hop read the changeable daily weather that brings rain to sustain everything and the momentary appearance of a deer drinking Cole wrote there's one season when the American forest surpasses all the world in gorgeousness that is the autumnal every hue is there you hear the emigres thomas cole taking pride in that cole also meant to thrill his audience by the sheer difficulty of the terrain here the jumble of rocks and water and trees at every stage in their lives the only humans are a pair of men descending it's hard to see I'm afraid but they are they're wearing breach cloths and feathers now this is 1826 and the native people had been driven out of the Catskills by white settlers a century earlier so Cole was exercising historical imagination setting the clock back recreating a time before Europeans arrived arrived to seize and settle the land Cole's paintings of the rugged mountains he were intended for sophisticated city dwellers a few of whom had seen the Catskills but they speak a language that was already familiar to that audience and the most important American artist to learn that language was a Boston painter of the previous generation Washington Alston who worked for many years in Europe Cole surely learned about Allston in New York but there's no evidence that they ever met the challenge for Alston here was to pay the scene of extreme privation the desert with the prophet Elijah being fed by Ravens to do that Alston adopted the picture language of Salvator Rosa the 17th century painter whose work became the exemplar of the sublime whose purpose was to inspire awe and fear in The Spectator it's the opposite of the beautiful whose exemplar was clawing around now Austin mastered the language of the sublime but he didn't apply it to American scenery Cole did and he didn't have to study paintings in Italy and to do that he could learn it in New York from prints that reproduced Salvatore roses compositions the blasted trees the unruly rocks the rushing streams the swirling clouds all of them belonged to a pan-european vocabulary that was already embedded in British paintings like those of Richard Wilson and Prince after them like this engraving that reproduces the great painting across the street in the British our center of Niobe in a turbulent landscape notice that both Wilson's and Austin's landscapes are settings for narrative scenes mythological and biblical stories respectively now as you'll see Cole's ambition went beyond landscape it was to paint historical scenes like these for an American audience later on Cole painted this little tribute on the right to Salvator Rosa an oil sketch by Cole of the Peter Salvatore sitting in a rocky wild place and drawing bandits in their hideout this is of course what Cole himself did seek out rough places in the Catskills not bandits and draw them Cole created a market for his fantasies of the American wilderness based on studies he made in the Catskills paintings show different seasons times of day and they're viewed from different vantage points where most of them where you could actually imagine yourself after a strenuous scramble most of you could imagine yourself reaching most of them are not actual places that we can identify but instead they're assemblages of this peak that Valley those rocks composed to accentuate the ruggedness and the inaccessibility of the Catskills and there are quite specific conditions like these mists rising and lingering in the valleys just as the Sun begins to glow over the notch of a distant summit and cast beams to either side you're to imagine yourself standing just a couple of steps back from the brink which is marked by a fallen branch and jagged rocks that like you are catching the first rays now here I want to say I've a debt to Brian Wolfe who taught here at Stanford at Yale - and who probes deepest into Cole's imagery to find both its structure and its roots in Cole's personality his book romantic revisions is especially good on these early Catskill paintings which is he writes in another essay taught the middle classes how to see an Aboriginal version of themselves in this picture we're invited to imagine ourselves descending into a scary jumble of huge slabs and boulders the Sun that's about to appear in that yellow flare has already melted some clouds and is chasing away others down there away at the bottom again very close to the edge our two men dressed in red and wearing leather stockings we associate with pioneers of four generations earlier I think Cole was alluding to james fenimore cooper's hero natty bump o hero of the novels the pioneers and the last of the mohicans bestsellers that began to appear three years earlier natty was the brave leather stocking with Chingachgook his Mohican friend and sidekick fears development and exploitation by white men and believes in peaceful coexistence with them here's a full-blown fantasy of mountain peaks roiling clouds falling water and I think the absolute best of coals trees that's been shattered by the force of the weather but is defiant still sprouting leaves and proclaiming God's power to give life and to take it there was one place among the Catskill Mountain sites that Cole painted several times setting an example for many other artists it's Carter skill Falls this was already a famous place when Cole drew and painted it cascade drops to a pool outside a deep cave now it's unique in these mountains because you can climb up and into the cave and see and hear the Falls from the inside as Cole did first he drew it - the plume and then in his studio he added water plus the fierce red autumn leaves and the pile up of rain clouds this is evidently the first of his compositions of the Falls which he showed in his debut of 1825 this is a replica that I'm showing you that Cole painted for his patron Daniel wodsworth of Hartford you can imagine the novelty of this vantage point for spectators to be put inside the Falls a dark great rain storm threatening outside the water pounding down in v-shaped gobbets just how a falling water actually behaves and imagining the roar echoing off the walls behind you the most comprehensive view of the Falls is one that shows the double cascade again there's a rain storm again its flaming autumn but now we see the full height of the Falls and feel its full power the lower bigger cave is the one we were just in coal was opposite some hundreds of yards away and when you're on the site you can actually follow around and from the left in this slider around the rim and reach a spot from which you can see something like this which is Cole's compositional sketch with notes to himself about colors and light and shade it's hard to make out but it's easier if we just look at the top part I put an arrow to the top of the Falls we can see Cole's intentions even better in this chalk drawing it shows what the other drawing did and it makes some odd details more obvious up there on the rocks there are some lines suggesting railings and perhaps a building at the right looking up close there they are railings and a roof you don't see them in the painting in the painting this is wild inaccessible country in the drawing there are two little figures which I can show here at the bottom with the arrow two little figures near the bottom silhouetted against the cave in the painting they're replaced by one bare chested man wearing a feathered bonnet and carrying a bow so from the changes Cole made hangs a tale of wilderness and civilization in the Catskills that I think it's worth telling for a few minutes today you can hike up and see Carter skill Falls as much as it was in 1826 some changes it's a familiar and popular hike and you can do it yourselves this place was familiar to New Yorkers when Asher B Durand wanted to paint a memorial to his friend Cole after his death he showed the painter in conversation with the poet William Cullen Bryant overlooking a gorge and a water faul that's based on carter skill Falls the country around Carter skill Falls had been changing when Cole got there in this view he painted in 1827 you see Catskill Creek in the foreground and in the mountains you see Carter skill clove notes my arrow where Carter's Gill falls is you can also see in the center plumes of smoke rising far in the distance right at the foot of the mountains not from campfires or brush fires but from tanneries where animal hides were treated to become leather tanning at used the bark of hemlock trees which were rich in tannin and those trees were abundant in the Catskills and in Cole's lifetime millions millions were felled were girdled and stripped of their bark and the logs left to rot tubs of water were kept continually hot by burning used and dried bark the used water with tannic acid in it was dumped into the streams the industry boomed all over the Catskills for about 25 years until the supply of accessible trees was simply exhausted Cole was fearful about this dis for deforestation and water pollution and other kinds of exploitation as you'll hear later well another sign of civilization is just visible here look up further on the ridge of the mountain you may notice a tiny patch of white I'm putting it in the box just about anybody at the time would have known what that was that was the new Catskill Mountain House the first resort hotel in America it was built a few years before at great expense by local investors to attract visitors and put them up in more comfort than they'd had and rooming houses here it is a couple of years later in a print made from a painting by Cole from the front of the hotel there was a famous view you could see up and down the Hudson River and all the way across to Massachusetts and into Vermont the front one wasn't much but a fact a famous rock ledge hung out over the escarpment to amuse you if Cole had the money to stay there while he was drawing Catskill Falls in 1825 he wouldn't have needed to walk the mile and a half over there he could have hired a horse or a carriage Falls was on a short list of attractions that guests came all the way to see and they came by the thousands each summer when people started flocking to the Catskill Mountain House in 1824 the owner of the land around the Falls one Peter Scott smelled money so he built a viewing platform and a refreshment stand at the top of the hill at the top of the falls called the spray house and they were operating when Cole first came here in 1825 that's what you saw in his drawing and what he chose not to include in his painting should built stairs down from the spray house to the cave under the falls he built a boardwalk inside the cave to weather cold climbed up the Falls to the cave as we'd like to imagine or took the staircase down to it we don't know to flash forward in the 40 years and to lectures to the time of Sandford Gifford who hiked and painted here 25 years later the Falls had become even more civilized mr. shott had built a hotel of his own to compete with the mountain house called the Laurel house right at the top of the Falls wait at the right you can just see the roof of the spray house guests of the hotel and day-trippers headed down the stairs along the Falls and down into the cavern and across the boardwalk like these intrepid girls with long dresses and walking sticks who were playing it safe people with more nerve down here ventured down the slippery rocks and back up again the picture is by the great illustrator Winslow Homer whom we know better as a painter the view and the roar of the water and the cool breezes must have been a delight in the summer but wait there's more you could order something from the bar for a price the host would have a basket of champagne and glasses and picnic food lowered down to you from above there way up there at the top of the platform or mr. chutes men and there are the thirsty customers waiting at the bottom and if you were visiting in dry season and the creek wasn't running fast enough to make the Falls spectacular no problem just above the falls there was a small mill pond with a dam and a sluice gate if you paid him a quarter the proprietor would release a gush of water and yeah sorry there's the on the right there's the there's the champagne basket so in the Catskill wilderness attendance was attendance was excellent business was good and it got even better as time went on our notion of wilderness as a place that's hard to reach unimproved truly wild and important to preserve or to restore to that condition that's a notion that was still several generations in the future it had to wait until things got much worse well on canvas at least coal could think away the tourist amenities and make it wild again for himself and his admiring customers most of Cole's early landscapes from this period are based on actual observations they give us some of the sensation of being there of experiencing the rush produced by the dizzy viewpoints for Cole's audience that was something new climbing mountains was not a common pastime in the 1820s in fact it's hard for us to imagine the awe and the free soul of fear that Cole spectators mine felt to judge from the excited language that his reviewer is used for pictures like this well in real life this some mountain that you see in the foreground of Cole's painting this mountain Mountain was a unremarkable little knob called Round Top with a high peak behind it and the Hudson River there in the distance Cole exaggerated it for effect making it look like an empty stage for some kind of heroic event or maybe even terrible sacrifice Cole's deepest belief was that art should not merely give pleasure but also awaken moral consciousness and strengthen it and he really believed that landscape could do that not only as a setting for stories from the Bible or as embodying instructive allegories but also on its own as it is here by stirring the spectator to feelings of awe and reverence in nature in the same year a coal began to show his clients what he could do with a story here's John the Baptist preaching not exactly in the desert of Judea or the Catskills either but instead a kind of imaginary wilderness of craggy mountains and a stupefying imaginary Gorge with a waterfall and palm trees Cole wasn't making this up out of whole cloth he was again looking at prints he was looking at for example his famous British contemporary John Martin and this print reproduces Martin's dizzi rendition of miraculous event Martin's visionary landscapes were inspired by Turner but are even less plausible ganga wodsworth of hartford bought the st. john's among other pictures by cole and he commissioned this one a subject from one of the contemporary novels by Fenimore Cooper I mentioned earlier the last of the Mohicans the setting is another improbable mountain range with some cat skilosh features like the ledge here this bigger version of the one in front of the mountain house Cole shows a big moment in the story when the two daughters of the British Colonel have been captured and a tribal elders bleeding before Tommen owned the chief of the Delaware tribe Cole's Baltimore patron Robert Gilmore admired this painting and he ordered a replica but he had doubts about pictures that departed from actual truth to nature Cole believed that to make a good landscape he needed to observe and select and adapt and take liberties in order to make what he called in quotes competent compositions exactly the kind of thing that Gilmour thought was inferior Cole wrote him a strong reply saying that painted compositions don't have to depart from nature on the contrary the most lovely and beautiful parts of nature may be brought together and combined in a hole that shall surpass in beauty and effect any picture painted from a single view this is what Cole called a higher type of landscape an idea that he drew from Joshua Reynolds and classical art theory Cole struggled all his life to reconcile his elevated ideals with what most American buyers wanted realistic views of American places his most courageous attempt at a historical landscape was a pair of pictures of the Garden of Eden and the expulsion of Adam and Eve which he hoped one of his enthusiastic collectors would buy the expulsion here has extravagance beyond anything he'd conceived before a vast flowery garden on the right contrasted with a terrifying word world outside and once more the inspiration was John Martin's Prince Prince in particular this one of the same subject backed up by Turner's imaginary landscapes like this one at the bottom Cole makes the world after the fall a place of violent storms and terrifying waterfalls and twisted and broken trees and predators like the wolf here at the bottom of left looking up at our ancestors from his dinner of a stag Cole had serious fears for the future of the country that he'd adopted he'd lived during both to terms of Andrew Jackson's populist presidency a period of violent disagreement between political factions over slavery over the rights of laborers over the growth of a callous plutocracy and many other signs of danger in one of his poems : Cole wrote about the deluge in Genesis where he saw a lesson for modern times that sinful humanity might expect what he called heavens mighty vengeance and an awful flood of Wrath that may come in 1829 Cole returned to England spent two years there learning a great deal but professed to be disappointed in British painters including Turner for their lack of attention to detail he wrote the detail ork not to be neglected in the grandest subjects a picture without detail is a mere sketch well after his return to America Cole poured his moral and political being into his most ambitious project the course of Empire this is an allegorical cycle cycle that was commissioned by lumen Reed a self-made New York businessman and an ambitious patron of Cole's Reid may never have fully grasped how subversive the program was for his pictures the story of the rise and fall of a civilization most resembling Great Britain but also a warning aimed at the materialist expansionist United States of America Cole wrote the moral principle of the nation is much lower than formerly it is with sorrow that I anticipate the downfall of this Republican government it proceeds this way according to Cole's explanation and a layout that he made for the owners fireplace wall first at the top came the savage state of hunting and gathering and community there's a circle of teepees note the arrow at the top to make sure that Americans didn't miss the lesson everything is emerging from the mists of time then down below the Arcadian or pastoral sunny harmonious with learning emerging in the person of Pythagoras like old man scratching calculations in the dirt so mathematics and religion eventually enable the grand climax here which is a stupendous seaport with overweening commercial and civic and religious architecture at the bottom the Emperor is entering and triumphs many hundreds of citizens are enjoying every possible luxury the Indian elephant in the parade and the people of all races in the Emperor's entourage seem obviously aimed at England and so is the display of white colonnades here as Tim behringer has pointed out they look like Regency terraces in London by John Nash and I'd add as well of the gigantic fantasies of Joseph Gandhi who was a renderer for Sir John Soane Cole took a great interest in contempt architecture and no doubt studied it closely in England societies pay a price for self-indulgence according to Edward Gibbons history of the Roman Empire which in Cole's time had been required reading for 50 years in the last two pictures Cole shows an invasion by stronger hungrier men who sack and burr in the city and decapitate the colossal statue of the God of War mr. Cole's ironical comment on the former strength and virtue of the citizens that's been corrupted a cycle ends with abandonment and desolation a return to a stage even before the primitive state the same mountain peak is there in each picture nature survives human civilizations wax and wane rise and fall this was an audacious project it was Cole's most serious attempt at moral allegory expressed in landscape but this picture instead may be goals Cole's greatest achievement a large landscape that embodies the duality of wild nature on one hand and civilization on the other our viewpoint is on holyoke mountain a little above the thick brush looking past a familiar storm storm blasted a tree to heavy clouds and more weather coming almost hidden in the brush is a painter and near him is a his parasol and a backpack he's observing what we also see the Connecticut River and the strange looping detour that it takes into the valley at Northampton Cole traveled up there in 1833 and he made it drawing across two pages of his sketchbook at the top there noting the rocks in the hill into the southwest and the great Oxbow meander of the river he used the drawing and his memory to make a quick oil sketch very much like the oil sketches by constable that he'd seen in London a few years earlier the point of view is a little higher there are low hills here in the distance and storm clouds in the finished painting he's used some poetic license with the height of the hills in the distance and closing the valley not to mention with the elevation of the so-called mountain that he's sitting on which you can see is really only 800 feet above the river of the photograph until she tells you that all these manipulations have a function they define this place more clearly and express its points more emphatically the flatland divided by settlers into rectangular plowed fields the roads the plumes of smoke from chimneys and the cultivation pushing back the wild lands surrounding it this is more than a suggestion here that in time the cultivated is going to win out and how true that was and the railroad up from Springfield on the Left came in Cole's lifetime closing off the Oxbow in 1845 and then came the highway route 5 and then interstate 91 you can see the result for yourself as you drive up towards Northampton on interstate 91 right across the Oxbow let me show you two more non Catskill paintings of the 1830s they're wonderful and they embody lessons that cold learned in the Catskills but on a grander scale this view of swoon Mountain resulted from a sketching trip to the Adirondacks as usual he painted it later in his studio which was no longer in New York but now in his farmhouse and Catskill it's reasonably faithful to what he would have seen there which is a remote valley crowned by a pyramidal peak now called Hoffman Mountain in real life that mountains not as dramatically pointed as coal painted it nor as hi in relation to the surrounding country coal boosted it and sharpened it as he done with mountains in the Catskills it wasn't autumn when he went there so he had to invent some fall foliage which he was thoroughly practiced at and he gave the mountain a great wreath of clouds what's interesting is his choice of vantage points I think this one is very low not on a spur a Ledge or anything we can see it our feet but some we're only just a little above this dense thick brush from which we barely see the middle ground and a pond in the distance so it's kind of the opposite of our perch above the Oxbow which gave us literally a superior view from above here we feel on the contrary enveloped and if anything out of the element our element there's an intimidating scale here and also big sweeping forms the slopes of the mountain along a ridge of the heel at the right the lifting curves of the clouds all of these give unity and grandeur to the composition and they also play off against this sort of witchy ballet of the dead trees right in front of us this is a view in Crawford notch in New Hampshire where summer people had begun to come tucked into the trees here is the little bitty notch house where you could stay and hire donkeys to take you to the heights of the mountains what Cole doesn't show is the Turnpike that it made it easy for stagecoaches to get up here from Conway and points south which ran right through the picture he puts the spectator with his back to the Crawford House Hotel which had been built ten years earlier on the model of the Catskill Mountain House and was much nicer than the old notch house here at the top so civilization had come to Crawford notch summers at least and Cole had the benefit he took the view from his hotel but he showed the notch and earlier time when the land had not been cleared for very long as the stumps tell you Crawford notch was not only a dramatic site for coals audience but there was a fear factor to a dozen years before there had been an avalanche in the pass a tremendous well-publicized avalanche that wiped out an entire family that was living near this spot so I think there were messages in the site itself the bright changing leaves the gathering clouds that dead trees alter reminders of mortality for at least some calls audience now let me return to our starting point this view of Catskill Creek coal painted at just the same year as the Adirondack landscape who were looking at that emphasizes and even exaggerated s' the grand scale the inhospitable surroundings and the remote majesty of the mountain it's a painting in the full sublime mode this is in the picturesque mode which Cole knew well from Claude Lawrence landscape and from adaptive shape adaptations of Claude's formulas by British and American artists in this mode nature is at peace people are at work but not strenuously and some are in repose divine favor is manifest benevolence and harmony rule Cole had begun to fit the Hudson River Valley into this idealizing mold a dozen years earlier you recall civilization still wrists lightly on the land there are sheep here and there and there are a few buildings and cultivated fields plumes of smoke from tanneries and barely visible the tiny sign that hotel guests are up there in the mountains having themselves a bit of sublime a river runs through it there's a little waterfall at the left and a broad Bend and then it disappears trees frame the view one alive the other dead familiar props these are in pastoral landscapes like this and reminders of the course of all living things its excuse me morning in America at the lower right a couple walks across the field and you can imagine them having a chat of the kind that Shepherds have in pastoral poetry since antiquity the Yale picture only has that cabin to suggest what people are doing here living simply that's clear are they Cole's contemporaries at leisure do they belong to some specified unspecified earlier era when everything was simpler something like the Arcadian or pastoral state that Cole imagined in the course of empire well there's another version of this composition with a flattened oval shape smaller somewhat more loosely painted not signed or dated which seems to me it must be a first attempt at the scene in the Yale version you can see the sky is higher the composition is tightened superfluous details like the big floating branch are removed and the trees are a lot more varied in shape and painted more vigorously Cole created a demand for these small idyllic pictures and he supplied it with several more and we still in this picture in Boston look West and it's late in the day but Cole has switched the mountains to to more familiar shapes in the range the high peak and Round Table Mountain as you've seen before the foliage has the richer color of early autumn and Cole supplies more particulars from his very large supply of observations like the water flowing over a low Falls trees at the left a clutch at the bank that's a routing under them and their sheep in the pasture far in the distance no houses and nobody around except the man in the rowboat who's shipped his oars to rest and look at the sunset this painting could almost be a vignette taken from a bigger picture of four years earlier there's more going on here as another oarsmen rowing up river without cargo there's a single house above him the only one visible in the whole broad scene and fields under cultivation or for pasture down at the lower right comes a man with a gun over his shoulder evidently a hunter returning and in the foreground a mother is returning to her eager baby with flowers that she's just picked and in the clearing beyond - horses gallop across the grass with a man in hot pursuit waving a halter at them the whole thing is a vision of a good life being led in a place that has the flavor of Eden about it the dutiful adults and happy child suggests that perhaps life in this Eden may last even as the leaves are showing a tinge of brown and the Sun is declining in the West Cole's painting at the Met has a counterpart at the MFA in Boston painted six years later it's smaller but the scope of the view is similar the similarities and the differences have stimulated a lot of interpretation the Boston picture is strikingly green there's nothing of the elegy here no end of the day feeling no sense of times past there is more clear land at the right cleared and still more patches of clearing in the distance there are four houses now we see more river because the toll mature trees are mostly gone and the banks are lined with willows not bigger trees anymore the man with the axe in the foreground has been working he's got his dog and his jug nearby and he may be the one who cut the logs near him and maybe much more downed timber over the woodsman's head are some details that tell the story Catskill Creek has a bridge built for the Train that's just crossing in the tracks of the Catskill encounter Johari railroad were delayed not far from Cole's house beginning eight years before in fact just when he painted the painted the main met picture he wrote about this to his patron gilmore in Baltimore he wrote the copper hearted barbarians are cutting all the trees down in the beautiful valley on which I have looked so often with a loving eye and then later in his diary he wrote 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 but it is not so they desecrate whatever they touch they cut down the forest with a wantonness for which there's no excuse even gain and leave the herbalist rocks to glimmer in the burning Sun the future has come to Catskill now trains chugged through many rural American landscape paintings around mid-century just what the artist meant by this has been debated a good deal and the machine in the garden as Leo Marx called it has been seen as the incorporation by artists of contemporary reality into a pastoral tradition a positive adaptation in other words a kind of artistic updating that still preserves timeless order but Col loathe the railroad why would he painted here Allen Wallach has called this picture anti pasture rollin it has the form of pastoral landscape at one that's been violated Cole took his met composition of six years earlier and recast it in an attempt as Wallach says to awaken in his audience an awareness of how readily age-old Beauty could be reduced to Baroness the framing trees are gone the mother and the happy baby have been replaced by the woodcutter who destroys for profit the mellow golden light and muted greens are replaced by harder light and much brighter greens of new growth one painting the Met picture looks back in time to a time past the other looks forward to a time of progress progress at a price in the yale painting you see a kind of rural american arcadia which might be anywhere except for the mountain in the distance and the fact that Cole gave titles to other pictures like this one identifying the river as Catskill Creek can we know if Cole actually observed the scene if he did where was he how accurate is this view of it or how much did he change since the mountains haven't moved and the Catskill Creek is more or less where it was we should be able to come up with answers or we might i've tried first of all the picture has been labeled for a long time North Mountain and Catskill Creek since it got to Yale a trouble is that there isn't any place near Catskill Creek where North Mountain looks like this it's a lot flatter I'll show you where we started by blundering around a Catskill in the car with a topo map and a photograph extremely annoying to Jill and a photograph because I insisted on driving following the creek as best we could given that the roads don't often follow the creeks and that trees have grown up in the meantime enormous Lee but I did find a spot on the river half-mile from Cole's house that correspondent pretty well nearby I found historical marker put there by the people of the Thomas Cole historical site so that was promising looking west toward the mountains they are just above the trees can you see above the trees was indeed the profile of a mountain but but a really boring Mountain compared to Cole's could that actually be North Mountain well I drove around outside town to check North Mountain from various angles that you could have from Catskill krieger from anywhere but the most dramatic view I could get was this one still pretty flat nothing like the crouching lion or Sphinx shape that Cole painted well I concluded that it couldn't be North Mountain so I went along the creek for some miles further west shopping for Cole's Mountain and I think I may have found it it's part of the Windham black head range which is a neighbor to North Mountain I'm seeing it here from across the fields of a chicken and egg farm which occupies the valley I tried to find a wide creek place on Cosco Creek from which Cole could have drawn the profile and anything like this way but I couldn't it's perfectly possible they did that though from another spot and combined it inserted the more dramatic looking mountain into a view of the creek seen from closer at home I'm afraid this was a lot of labor to produce a footnote tent but it does it does him demonstrate the liberties that Cole was prepared to make to make a more satisfying image and after all an ideal image just one last question where are we spectators supposed to be exactly in most of his Catskill paint is Cole puts us almost in the picture you know as though we were on the ground just outside the picture space that's part of the dramatic effect here we seem to be suspended out over the river with no visible means of support there is that's actually another conventional device in landscape painting it's like something like the the omniscient narrator in fiction you know where the author assumes an anonymous voice of someone who knows all and tells all but is never identified we accept that convention without even thinking about it as we do this one I think Cole saw our levitation you know as part of the artifice he applied to the painting the picture looks real we know it isn't it's a constructed thing we all know it an idealized view and Cole would have said it's better than real the next lecture is about this painting by an artist who studied with Cole who continued Cole's quest for American views that would stir American viewers please come back if you can [Applause]

Channel: Yale University Art Gallery

Views: 6,210

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Yale, University, Art, Gallery, John Walsh, Thomas Cole, American Views, Viewpoints

Id: 8PCNgGF336g

Length: 65min 51sec (3951 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 31 2017