Sunset in the Catskills

In an essay of 1836 Thomas Cole told American readers that there was one season when their forests surpassed anything in the world, and that season was autumn. Five years later, in 1841, the year he sailed for his second long stay in Europe, he painted this view full of it. Yellow and rust-coloured trees crowd both banks of a still river, a man rows a small boat across the reflections, and beyond a low weir the land runs back to blue mountains under the evening sky. Cole set the whole scene inside a painted arch, dark at the edges of the canvas. He signed it on a rock at the lower left, T. Cole 1841, and sold it that same year. Also in 1841 he painted Mill Dam on the Catskill Creek, on a canvas of almost exactly this size, now in the Currier Museum of Art in New Hampshire.