River in the Catskills

Look past the man in the red coat and the felled trees in the foreground, and a small steam train is crossing the valley in the distance. The museum considers this the earliest known American oil painting to show a train. Cole lived in the village of Catskill, and the line is usually identified as the Canajoharie and Catskill Railroad, pushed inland from the village in the late 1830s. It went badly. In 1840 a bridge on the line collapsed, killing one person, the company failed, and by 1842 the railroad had been sold and scrapped. Cole dated this canvas 1843, so if it is that line, the engine he painted had already gone from the real valley. In 1836 he had written about the ravages of the axe in the American wilderness, and here the man in red holds one, standing in a clearing of cut trunks. Some years earlier Cole had painted the same stretch of Catskill Creek with none of this, a calm autumn view now in the Metropolitan Museum. Cole painted the Boston picture on his own account, without a commission.