The Oxbow

The river almost closes into a loop. Follow its bright curve through the fields, then look left toward the dark clouds and the broken tree in the foreground. Thomas Cole divided this view between a stormy, wooded slope and a valley lit by sun. He painted the Connecticut River’s Oxbow from Mount Holyoke in Massachusetts in 1836. Near the lower center, a very small figure pauses beside sketching equipment and looks outward. That is Cole himself. Finding him helps you judge the scale of the view, which stretches from nearby leaves to fields far across the water. The contrast also belongs to a nineteenth-century view of land shaped by Euro-American settlement. Cole places cultivated fields beside wooded ground that his audience could read as wilderness. The painting’s broad division leaves much of the land’s earlier human history outside the scene. Stay with the visible details on the sunny side. Thin boundaries divide the fields, and small traces of smoke rise through the valley beyond the river bend.