Kaaterskill Falls

By 1826, when Thomas Cole painted this, Kaaterskill Falls in the Catskills was already a popular tourist stop, complete with a wooden viewing platform built out over the rocks for visitors. Cole left every trace of that out. Instead he shows the double cascade dropping through untouched forest, and on a ledge above the lower fall he places a single tiny figure, a Native American, alone, looking out over the gorge. The young United States was hungry for scenery it could call its own, grand enough to rival the cathedrals and ruins of Europe, and Cole gave it exactly that, a wilderness that felt ancient and unspoiled. This was one of the pictures from his first Catskills journey that launched the Hudson River School, and Daniel Wadsworth, who bought it, later left it to the museum in Hartford that bears his name.