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The Oxbow
Thomas Cole · Romanticism & Landscape
- Artist
- Thomas Cole (1801–1848)
- Date
- 1836
- Dimensions
- 130.8 x 193 cm
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Location
- Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, United States
The Oxbow, or View from Mount Holyoke after a Thunderstorm, shows a sweeping panorama of the Connecticut River valley in Massachusetts, where the river makes a great U-shaped bend. A storm is passing over the landscape.
A closer look
The painting is divided diagonally in two. On the left, wild, storm-battered forest and dark clouds; on the right, sunlit farmland, neat fields and the curving river. Between them, the artist himself sits at his easel, tiny on the hillside, looking back at us. Cole, who worried about the destruction of America’s wilderness, seems to set nature and civilisation side by side and invite us to weigh them. On the distant hillside, cleared patches of forest have been read as the Hebrew word Noah, or Shaddai, the Almighty, when seen upside down.
History of the painting
Cole showed The Oxbow at the National Academy of Design in New York in 1836, and it was bought by Charles N. Talbot, a merchant, for 500 dollars. It remained in private hands for seventy years. In 1908 Mrs Russell Sage, one of the great philanthropists of her time, gave it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it is now one of the most celebrated American paintings.
