Lake with Dead Trees (Catskill)

In the autumn of 1825 three landscapes by an unknown 24-year-old sat in the window of a New York frame shop. The established painter John Trumbull happened past, stopped, and bought one, telling friends that this young man saw things in the American wilderness that older artists had missed. The young man was Thomas Cole, English-born, just back from sketching in the Catskill Mountains. This is one of those pictures. He pushed the real scene toward something wilder and lonelier: bleached dead trees in the foreground, two deer bolting, a low sun behind the ridges. The three paintings launched his career and, with it, the Hudson River School. The man who bought this one was the writer William Dunlap, who soon gave Cole a place in the first real history of American art.