The Oxbow

From a high, storm-swept hill the Connecticut River loops in a great oxbow below, the canvas split between wild, blasted forest under dark clouds on the left and a sunlit, cultivated valley on the right - and at the lower center, tiny, the painter himself looks up from his easel. Thomas Cole stages a meditation on wilderness and civilization, the American land poised between the two. Now in the Metropolitan Museum, the Oxbow is a founding masterpiece of the Hudson River School and one of the great statements of American landscape painting.