View of Schroon Mountain, Essex County, New York, After a Storm
Thomas Cole (American, born England,1801–1848)
1838
- Medium
- oil on canvas
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- Framed: 132.5 x 193.5 x 13 cm (52 3/16 x 76 3/16 x 5 1/8 in.); Unframed: 99.8 x 160.6 cm (39 5/16 x 63 1/4 in.)
- Culture
- America
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, American Painting and Sculpture
- Credit line
- Hinman B. Hurlbut Collection
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Kids profiles and older: it shows nature, places, still life or a children's book. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
Championing the American wilderness, Cole declared, "We are still in Eden," in his Essay on American Scenery, published two years before he painted this view of the Adirondacks. The artist sketched the scene in early summer, but when he created the painting in his studio, he rendered it in a dramatic blaze of fall colors. Such a choice likely had nationalistic overtones; he once proclaimed that autumn was "one season where the American forest surpasses all the world in gorgeousness."
Cole included two Indigenous men in the painting’s right foreground foliage. At this time, the Adirondacks remained home to many Native Americans long after most had been forcibly removed from land east of the Mississippi River. While continuing to live, hunt, and fish in the area, these Algonquian and Iroquoian peoples were compelled to significantly adapt their existence amid increasing White settlement and its attendant lumber, mining, and tourist industries.
