Genesee Scenery

Thomas Cole painted this in 1847, the year before he died, and by then his taste had cooled from the storms and ruins of his earlier work toward something calmer. He was the first artist to paint this particular stretch of the Genesee River in western New York, and he built the view from separate drawings made on the spot, notes on the shapes of the trees and the rust colours in the rock, assembled into a single high vantage looking down. Cole spent much of his career uneasy about what railroads and clearing were doing to the American wilderness. Here that worry is barely a whisper. Look for the small footbridge and mill low in the scene, a modest human foothold almost swallowed by the falling water and the woods around it.