Thomas Cole, The Hunter’s Return, 1845, oil on canvas (Amon Carter Museum of American Art). Speakers: Dr. Maggie Adler, Curator, Amon Carter Museum of American Art and Dr. Beth Harris
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Dr. Beth Harris: [0:10] We’re in the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, looking at a large landscape painting by Thomas Cole called “The Hunter’s Return.” We can see the hunter returning from his hunt, walking toward this lovely sunlit cottage.
Dr. Maggie Adler: [0:21] This cottage is the home to a very settled family. You can see that from the vegetable garden, the dogs that are trying to sneak a little bit of food…
Dr. Harris: [0:34] I love the child playing with the dog in the foreground, too. There’s a real sense of domestic happiness here.
Dr. Adler: [0:42] Right, unless you’ve settled the land, it’s unusual to see multiple generations, including an infant. This represents a family that has put down roots.
Dr. Harris: [0:51] We are surrounded by the wilderness, the wilderness that Cole so loved about the American landscape.
Dr. Adler: [0:56] I like to talk about Cole as the first real environmentalist artist. In the 19th century, it was common to go abroad to Europe. Cole’s best friend was the poet William Cullen Bryant, and he said, “When you go to Europe, you’re going to see everywhere the trace of man, everywhere human civilization in the form of buildings and ruins.”
[1:18] What he said was unique about American culture was untouched nature, so he encouraged Cole, when he went abroad, to keep that earlier, wilder image bright of the American wilderness.
Dr. Harris: [1:25] Now, of course, Native Americans were here, and this wasn’t this untouched landscape.
Dr. Adler: [1:30] Absolutely, but how do you make a distinctive mark as an American artist for an American audience? You do it by recording the places that they may not have the luxury of experiencing from their city homes.
Dr. Harris: [1:47] He’s got everything here that you would want in a landscape. He’s got this fabulous sky, these lovely touches of cloud, this mountain range that is turning purplish as the sun sets behind it, a lake in the middle ground, what looks like a little waterfall, these lovely autumn trees framing this cottage that’s drenched in sunlight.
[2:06] One’s eye travels through this in real enjoyment and pleasure.
Dr. Adler: [2:11] Though he’s showing this wilderness, we know that by the 1840s, when he’s painting this, this is a nostalgic view, because in fact, the railroad is developing, tanneries have populated the East Coast, and the lumber merchants are deforesting the landscape.
Dr. Harris: [2:34] This was something that Cole returned to again and again, this idea that, by necessity, the United States had to transform nature and make it useful and build things like the Erie Canal that enabled trade between the Northeast and the Midwest.
[2:54] This inevitable economic development that he feared and worried about and longed for America to stay very much the way he pictures it in this landscape, but even here we have the sense of what’s to come.
Dr. Maggie Adler: [3:03] It’s a conflicted painting because in the foreground you see the results in exaggerated form of these giant trees that have been felled for the march of civilization.
Dr. Harris: [3:13] In fact, it was the very year that this was painted, 1845, that the term Manifest Destiny is coined.
Dr. Adler: [3:21] Many of the landscape painters were seeking new frontiers to continue that idea of uncultivated lands. That was becoming more and more difficult on the East Coast because there were very few lands that were uncultivated. There was this desire and encouragement for people to move westward. That’s the idea of Manifest Destiny.
Dr. Harris: [0:00] We might at first think that this is a painting of a specific scene.
Dr. Adler: [3:46] A lot of the landscapes are an amalgam of many, many different trips into the out-of-doors and the memories that those artists had of those specific locations.
[3:55] Cole himself lived in the Hudson River Valley, in the Catskills, so you might look at the autumn foliage as looking like something that Cole would see from his house, but it’s really a patchwork quilt of his experiences and other artworks, including those of European artists like Claude Lorraine, works that he would have seen in engravings.
[4:14] People often ask me, “how do you know that Cole was an environmentalist? Is that just something that you are basing on evidence that’s in the pictures itself?” But in fact, in 1836, he wrote an essay for the “American Monthly” magazine called “An Essay on American Scenery,” about America as an Eden and his concerns that the wilderness would be disappearing.
Dr. Harris: [4:34] He wrote, “I cannot but express my sorrow that the beauty of such landscapes are quickly passing away. The ravages of the acts are daily increasing. The most noble scenes are made desolate, and oftentimes with a wantonness and barbarism scarcely credible in a civilized nation. This is a regret rather than a complaint.
“[4:53] Such is the road society has to travel.”
Dr. Adler: [4:55] Yes, and he says, “There are those who regret that with the improvements of cultivation, the sublimity of the wilderness should pass away.” We use the word “sublime” in a wholly positive way now. We’ve lost the association that it had, that there was both beauty and danger involved in the landscape.
Dr. Harris: [5:13] There is this idea in the early years of the 19th century of God’s presence in nature.
Dr. Adler: [5:19] The religious sentiment associated with the landscape was very much part of Cole’s vocabulary.
Dr. Harris: [5:25] You can imagine, too, with this idea of seeing God’s handiwork in nature, that this transformation of the United States into an industrial culture would arouse anxiety.
Dr. Adler: [5:42] And that’s very much in evidence in the “Essay on American Scenery,” is this experience of God through natural works and the dangers of disrupting that.
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The seemingly untouched quality of the nation’s wilderness distinguished the United States from Europe. The landscape came increasingly to embody what Americans most valued in themselves: an “unstoried” past, and “Adamic” freedom, an openness to the future, a fresh lease on life. In time, Americans came to think of themselves as “nature’s nation.” And yet one of the paradoxes of American history…lay in the unresolved tension between the subduing of the wilderness and the honoring of it. The tension is still alive with us today, in the competing voices of environmentalists and advocates of development.
Angela L. Miller, Janet Catherine Berlo, Bryan J. Wolf, and Jennifer L. Roberts, American Encounters: Art, History, and Cultural Identity (Washington University Libraries, 2018), p. 24 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
An unresolved tension
For much of the nineteenth century, America’s landscape was intimately connected with the nation’s identity (unlike Europe, nature in North America was seen as untouched by the hand of man). But the United States has also always prided itself on its entrepreneurial spirit, its economic progress, and its industry. This tension between the nation’s natural beauty and the inevitable expansion of industry was clearly felt in the mid-nineteenth century as logging, mining, railroads, and factories were quickly diminishing what once seemed an endless wilderness. Thomas Cole (1801-48) beautifully expressed the tension between these two American ideals in many of his landscape paintings.
Thomas Jefferson had envisioned that American democracy would be sustained by a nation of yeoman farmers who worked small farms with their families—such as the household pictured by Cole. By the end of 19th century, however, manufacturing had became a primary driver of the American economy.
The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 linked midwestern farms with cities on the east coast. Tanneries (where animal hides were processed to make leather using tannin, which was derived from hemlock trees) proliferated and lumber merchants deforested the landscape. As many as 70 million eastern hemlock trees were cut down to provide tannin. Beginning in the 1830s, the railroad had begun to cut across the American landscape, allowing for easier transportation of goods and passengers.
As the east coast grew increasingly populous and developed, more people moved westward in search of economic opportunity. The Homestead Acts were a series of laws enacted in 1862 to provide 160-acre lots of land at low cost, to encourage settlers to move west, answering Manifest Destiny’s [popup] call for westward expansion (the term was coined in 1845, the year this painting was made). Importantly, the popular conception of the west as unspoiled territory ignored the many nations of American Indians who had already settled the North American continent.
Cole’s painting
Though Cole’s The Hunter’s Return features human figures, it was seen as a landscape painting, since nature is dominant. In the art academies of Europe landscapes were not accorded the same respect as history paintings (whose subjects came from history, the bible or mythology, and therefore had clear moral elements and treated noble subjects), but Cole was intent on elevating his landscapes by imbuing them with a more serious message.
At first glance, a viewer might assume that this painting is set in the Catskill Mountains in the Hudson River Valley in New York State where Cole lived and painted, but in fact this painting is a composite of many scenes, and promotes a specific point of view—one that is ambivalent about the ways that Americans were rapidly transforming the natural beauty that was so fundamental to the nation’s understanding of itself. The foreground of the painting juxtaposes the tree stumps left by man’s axe against the more pristine wilderness seen in the middle and background of the painting.
Cole’s image then is not real, but nostalgic. The artist gave voice to the longing for a pristine, pre-industrial America. Cole wrote,
I cannot but express my sorrow that the beauty of such landscapes are quickly passing away. The ravages of the axe are daily increasing. The most noble scenes are made desolate, and oftentimes with a wantonness and barbarism scarcely credible in a civilized nation. This is a regret rather than a complaint. Such is the road society has to travel.
Thomas Cole, “Essay on American Scenery,” The American Monthly Magazine, vol. 7, January 1836, p. 12.
