THOMAS COLE'S OXBOW AND THE AMERICAN ZION DIVIDED.pdf

Thomas Cole, View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow, 1836. Oil, 51 ½ x 76 in. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Mrs. Russell Sage This content downloaded from 198.091.037.002 on April 14, 2017 21:09:00 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Thomas Cole’s Oxbow and the American Zion Divided David Bjelajac David Bjelajac Thomas Cole’s View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm, better known today as The Oxbow (frontispiece), has achieved canonical status in the history of American landscape painting. Some scholars have examined its tantalizing oppositions—wilderness on the left and cultivated land on the right, areas of detail and areas of breadth, dark and light—for meaning. Others believe they have discerned Hebrew letters inscribed on the distant landscape. Art historians also have discussed how this representation of a popular New England tourist site set a standard in its time for horizontally shaped canvases representing sweeping vistas of national grandeur. Hudson River School artists may have adapted the elongated landscape format from the lateeighteenth-century invention in London of the panorama, a quasi-cinematic form of visual entertainment that quickly spread to the United States. Art historian Alan Wallach has analyzed The Oxbow in relation to the panopticon, the circular model for an ideal prison invented by British reformer and philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Inmates are led to believe that they are under constant surveillance from a central guard tower constituting a “sovereign gaze” or “eye of power.” Wallach argues that The 61 American Art Volume 20, Number 1 © 2006 Smithsonian Institution This content downloaded from 198.091.037.002 on April 14, 2017 21:09:00 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 1 Anonymous, Charles N. Talbot, portrait from In Memoriam. C. N. T., 1874. General Research Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations Oxbow constituted a similar “panoptic [all-seeing] sublime.” The picture offered beholders a feeling of omniscience and power based on the synthesis of its panoramic breadth and intensive, telescopic depiction of distant, finely rendered details. Wallach thus describes the view from Mount Holyoke as “a stunning metaphor for social aspiration and social dominance,” contending that the panoptic sublime drew its energy “from prevailing ideologies in which the exercise of power and the maintenance of the social order required vision and supervision, foresight, and especially oversight—a word equally applicable to panoramic views and to the operation of . . . the prison, the hospital, the school, and the factory.”1 I wish to build on this wealth of existing scholarship by reinterpreting The Oxbow in relation to Cole’s spiritual life and his involvement—as well as his patron’s—in the moral and religious reform movements of the early nineteenth century. Though it evolved from a careful topographic sketch of a real locale in western Massachusetts, View from Mount Holyoke also, in my 62 view, represents an imaginative Christian allegory. The painting appropriated the Puritan tradition of identifying geographic locales in the New World with venerated biblical places, in this case the original wilderness/pastoral site for Solomon’s Temple. According to biblical accounts, the site encompassed both the lofty Mount Moriah and a threshing floor powered by oxen. Cole was familar with Puritan-inspired allegory from many sources, including engravings he had contributed in 1818 to a book by John Bunyan. He also drew on imagery he knew from Freemasonry (he had joined a Masonic lodge in Ohio early in his career). This supplied him with a rich storehouse of visual hieroglyphs for envisioning a potential amphitheater to God, a “New Jerusalem” in the American wilderness. The artist intended spectators to view his Oxbow and other landscapes through what he referred to as “the mind’s eye.” According to Cole, the mind’s eye sees through both time and space, reading nature’s forms as prophetic types or providential signs of a future state of being.2 An examination of the career of Charles N. Talbot (1802–1874; fig. 1), the affluent entrepreneur who purchased The Oxbow, will illuminate the reasons why a member of an urban alliance of fraternal cultural institutions, moral reform societies, and Christian groups might have welcomed Cole’s message at a time of popular restiveness and deep national divisions. Amid the rapidly growing economy and rising population of New York City in the 1830s, Talbot, Cole, and other New Yorkers witnessed pitched battles between Irish Catholic immigrants and Protestant nativists; strikes by newly unionized workers; anti-Masonic, populist resentment against political elites; and abolitionist agitation that threatened racial war and sectional conflict. Talbot, a leader in New York’s China trade and a supporter of the American Bible Society and other Spring 2006 This content downloaded from 198.091.037.002 on April 14, 2017 21:09:00 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). philanthropic and missionary groups, was a member of the mercantile elite that wished to marry capitalist economic expansion with efforts to achieve social harmony as well as the Protestant missionary goal of spreading God’s word to the four corners of the world. In this era of the Second Great Awakening, Protestant activists encouraged selfexamination and self-discipline; participation in voluntary associations with like-minded citizens helped members to cultivate a guiding interior, moral gaze. As the years passed and religious, sectarian, and civil strife intensified, however, Cole’s spatially divided Oxbow might be seen to express a more ambiguous vision. The Painting and Its Patron Shortly before the close of the 1836 annual exhibition at the National Academy of Design in New York, Thomas Cole (1801–1848) wrote a letter to Talbot, who had agreed to purchase View from Mount Holyoke for the artist’s asking price of five hundred dollars. This previously unpublished letter, sent from Catskill, New York, offers advice on how the large painting should be displayed in Talbot’s fashionable residence at 61 Bleecker Street and refers to the death of their mutual friend Luman Reed, who had recommended the picture to Talbot. You expressed a wish when I had the pleasure of seeing you last that I should call & see about placing your picture—I am very sorry that circumstances have prevented me from doing so. . . . The only advice I can offer, is, that it should have a side light & that it should be hung as low as can be conveniently—If you find any difficulty Mr. [Asher B.] Durand will very willingly assist you—I sincerely hope the picture will meet your entire approbation when you see it in your own house—I wish it the more earnestly because our regretted friend Mr. 63 Reed recommended the picture to you & was very desirous that it should be satisfactory—The scene is peculiar and I think will be interesting on account of being a well known one. I should be happy if at some future time I might paint you a picture of another character—some fancy subject in which landscape architecture & figures should be brought together—the one picture would then give value to the other.3 Whether or not Talbot asked Cole’s fellow landscapist Asher B. Durand for help in hanging the picture, the letter’s emphatic instruction to place it as low as possible on the wall demonstrates the artist’s intention that beholders be afforded a clear view of the composition from an all-seeing perspective, in which they were elevated above Mount Holyoke. A comparison among Cole’s preliminary drawings and the final oil painting shows how important this vantage was to him. Previous scholarship has suggested that his plan to execute The Oxbow crystallized in 1829, while the artist was in London at the beginning of a three-year European tour. When British travel writer Basil Hall published Forty Etchings Made with the Camera Lucida in North America in 1827 and 1828 (1829), a visual companion to his Travels in America, Cole made a precise tracing of Hall’s View from Mount Holyoke in Massachusetts (figs. 2, 3). Yet Cole’s painting of the Oxbow, dramatically divided by a diagonal line that separates the stormy mountain wilderness from the sunlit, cultivated river valley below, differs considerably from Hall’s topographic representation. A preparatory drawing sketched on location at Mount Holyoke in 1833 demonstrates Cole’s more imaginative, panoramic vision. Covering two pages of his sketchbook, the artist widened the angle of vision while raising the beholder’s perspective to provide a commanding view of the oxbow bend and the valley below (fig. 4). American Art This content downloaded from 198.091.037.002 on April 14, 2017 21:09:00 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Three years later, the finished painting more emphatically called attention to the oxbow configuration by further elevating the viewpoint and tilting the valley upward toward the picture plane.4 Cole had long been aware of Mount Holyoke’s potential as the subject for a landscape painting due to its popularity as a “well known” tourist site. In 1820, when Cole was just nineteen and living in Steubenville, Ohio, the former engraver-painter Benjamin Tappan, originally from Northampton, Massachusetts, helpfully critiqued the itinerant artist’s early landscapes. Tappan may have described Mount Holyoke, the Connecticut River, and his native Northampton for his young protégé. Years later, after gaining fame in New York for his Hudson River landscapes, Cole spent the summer of 1828 in Boston, where admiring patrons and friends could have corroborated regional tourist literature describing the beauty of Mount Holyoke and the Connecticut River valley. By 1821 a group of citizeninvestors from the Northampton area had constructed rustic, overnight accommodations atop Mount Holyoke. Four 64 Spring 2006 This content downloaded from 198.091.037.002 on April 14, 2017 21:09:00 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 2 Basil Hall, View from Mount Holyoke in Massachusetts. Etching, from Basil Hall, Forty Etchings . . . Made with the Camera Lucida, in North America (London, 1829). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 3 Thomas Cole, Mount Holyoke, Massachusetts, ca. 1829. Pencil on tracing paper, 6 x 8 ⅞ in. Detroit Institute of Arts, Founders Society Purchase, William H. Murphy Fund 4 Thomas Cole, Sketch for The Oxbow, ca. 1833. Pencil on paper, from sketchbook, 8 ⅞ x 13 ½ in. (each sheet). Detroit Institute of Arts, Founders Society Purchase, William H. Murphy Fund years later, some of the same residents, most of them Freemasons and members of the local Jerusalem Lodge, formed the Mount Holyoke Association with the intention of constructing a larger, more commodious Mountain House. The rustic inn made it possible for hundreds of tourists to visit Mount Holyoke annually. The initiative also typified American Freemasonry’s involvement in building projects that facilitated transportation and the tourist industry.5 When strapped for cash in 1836 and in need of a respite from his five-panel Course of Empire Series, an allegorical cycle of a mythical empire’s rise and decline, Cole wrote his sympathetic patron Luman Reed that he was about to paint over a large canvas originally intended for the Consummation panel (fig. 5). The artist said he planned to create instead on that canvas a quick, easily marketable American landscape, which would be shown at the annual National Academy of Design exhibition: “Fancy pictures seldom sell & they generally take more time than views so I have determined to paint one of the latter. I have already commenced a view from Mt. Holyoke. It is about the finest scene I have in my sketchbook & is well known.”6 Reed recommended the finished Oxbow painting to Talbot, and it sold swiftly, as Cole had hoped. It appealed to Talbot for a variety of reasons related to his family, business, and spiritual concerns. By the late 1820s Charles Talbot had succeeded his father as a leading merchant in New York’s China trade, importing silks, teas, porcelains, and other luxury goods from southern China. In establishing firms in New York and Canton, he had lived more than a decade in the narrow Canton trading district reserved by the Chinese imperial government for foreign merchants’ housing and business offices. When he returned to New York in 1833, he married Charlotte Richmond of Providence, Rhode Island. 65 Talbot was a new man of wealth, who aspired to emulate the cultural refinement of New York’s more established landed aristocrats as personified most notably by Albany magnate Stephen Van Rensselaer, another patron of Cole’s landscapes. Talbot was the grandson of Rhode Island stonemason Silas Talbot, who gained fame as naval commander of the USS Constitution (“Old Ironsides”). Proud of his grandfather’s military heroism, he embellished his family history by imaginatively tracing his English heritage to “Richard de Talbot,” a Norman aristocrat during the reign of William the Conqueror.7 Cole could have suggested a medieval theme of knightly valor as the “fancy subject” he proposed for a pendant to Talbot’s purchase. Such a picture would have expressed the family’s fictive ancestral identification with Christian chivalry and propertied wealth. But Cole’s judgment about the lack of market demand for “fancy pictures” was borne out when Talbot did not commission a companion painting. The merchant’s father, George Washington Talbot, was in the process of buying numerous copies of European paintings and sculptures for his son on a grand tour of Europe. Charles Talbot encouraged his father’s art spending spree as a good investment, writing from New York on April 7, 1836: “Should you even buy any thing that I cannot afford to keep—or have no place for it—they can easily be disposed of & no doubt to profit. People are making fortunes so fast that they do not hesitate at any expense. I have no doubt but that your friend Luman Reed has expended 50–100,000 dollars on paintings etc. etc. etc.”8 The topographic subject of Cole’s landscape painting had probably attracted Talbot, who had personal and commercial ties to Northampton. The patron’s father, in retirement from New York’s lucrative China trade, lived on Prospect Street in Northampton. Talbot American Art This content downloaded from 198.091.037.002 on April 14, 2017 21:09:00 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 5 Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: Consummation, ca. 1835–36. Oil, 51 ¼ x 76 in. New-York Historical Society had purchased the family homestead for his father in 1834 and also enjoyed the estate as a summer residence. Furthermore, Charles was on the New York–based board of directors for the Northampton Silk Company operated by silk manufacturing entrepreneur Samuel Whitmarsh. The company was launched during the spring of 1836, at the same time that Cole exhibited The Oxbow. As it happened, the editor of Northampton’s Hampshire Gazette was an agent for Whitmarsh. Thus, by March 1836, the venerable western Massachusetts newspaper was urging area farmers to buy mulberry seeds, trees, and silkworms. Whitmarsh and Talbot envisioned a mutually beneficial alliance of agriculture and rural manufacturing in the Connecticut River valley. Financially 66 hard-pressed New England farmers would be less tempted to move westward if they could profit from silk and the production of fine textile products.9 Charles Talbot, like Cole, was also culturally inclined to read nature in spiritual as well as material terms. After his marriage, he became a trustee of the Bleecker Street Presbyterian Church, whose evangelical pastor, Reverend Erskine Mason, taught that “Every planet, as it marches, is impelled by God; every star as it revolves, is turned by God; every flower as it opens, is unfolded by God; every blade of grass, as it springs, is reared by God.” For Mason the “mysteries of Providence” could be summarized by a verse from the book of Psalms (36:6): “Thy righteousness is like the great mountains; thy judgments Spring 2006 This content downloaded from 198.091.037.002 on April 14, 2017 21:09:00 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). are a great deep.” God unites opposites, the high and the low, the macrocosm and the microcosm, a theme visually expressed in Cole’s extensive-intensive View from Mount Holyoke.10 A Vast Amphitheater Shortly after the July 4 holiday in 1825, which celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Revolutionary War, the Boston Masonic Mirror and Mechanic’s Intelligencer published a substantial article advocating Mount Holyoke overlooking the Connecticut River near Northampton as a pleasurable tourist site for “the man of science” and the “Natural Philosopher.” Northampton’s Jerusalem Lodge may have encouraged the article, since its members had invested in the Mountain House. In harmony with the name of the lodge, the article’s author cast his experience in biblical terms: one descends the mountain “with better feelings and more devout adoration; and like the pious of old in viewing the mountains of Judea . . . exclaims, O ye mountains and hills, bless ye the Lord, praise and magnify him forever.” With “some choice friends,” the author had arrived at the summit at about 7 a.m.: It was then shrouded in mists and fogs, but soon the sun broke forth, [and] with his all effulgent beams dispelled them and presented to our view one of the most enchanting and picturesque prospects in nature. We were elevated above all other objects one thousand feet above the surface of the water of the river, and as far as the eye could extend no object interposed to obstruct our view. The whole fertile and beautiful valley of the Connecticut as painted at our feet by the hand of an inimitable Artist, with a thousand different hues presented itself. It resembled a vast amphitheatre of an eliptical form of more than fifty miles in extent on either side, while Holyoke rose as a lofty 67 throne in the centre, and the river with its waters appeared like a silver cord stretched from north to south, dividing it into two segments. The extensive savannas loaded with corn and grain, painted with the most lively green, and obedient to every gale, the plenteous orchards bending with fruit and dwindled to the size of shrubs, the ample plains where the bleating flocks and lowing herds mingle their grateful sounds at nature’s exuberance lay along the banks of the river.11 Cole’s View from Mount Holyoke appears to make visible the painterly imagery of the description from the Masonic Mirror, as both focus our lofty, unobstructed gaze on what the anonymous travel writer refers to as the “vast amphitheatre” of the oxbow’s elliptical form. Hung low on a wall in Charles Talbot’s Bleecker Street mansion, The Oxbow encouraged viewers to pause in their sweeping gaze of panoramic space, the better to survey carefully a variety of phenomena detailed in the valley below: the golden crops and livestock grazing or resting within fertile fields; prosperous, substantial buildings; serene river boats; and human figures leisurely walking or riding. Just as the writer used religious metaphors, so Cole deployed colors and shapes in a spiritually symbolic way. Long Island genre painter William Sidney Mount, who expressed admiration for the “fine” sky and clouds in The Oxbow, observed elsewhere in his diary that Cole generally painted skies “beautifully graduated from almost pure white . . . [to] red inclining to the delicate purple up to a rich blue.” Both Mount and Cole, like numerous other antebellum American painters, studied the color theories of contemporary English pigment manufacturer George Field. Field argued that God ordered the universe through a dialectical balance of the opposing forces of light and dark. According to Field, triadic relationships American Art This content downloaded from 198.091.037.002 on April 14, 2017 21:09:00 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 6 Frontispiece, George Field, Chromatography; or a Treatise on Colours and Pigments, and of their Powers in Painting (London: Charles Tilt, 1835). Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Paul Mellon Collection 7 Thomas Cole, Diagram of color wheel after George Field’s Chromatography, 1835. Sketchbook drawing. Princeton University Art Museum, Gift of Frank Jewett Mather Jr. 8 Engraved emblem for title page, George Field, Chromatics: Or an Essay on the Analogy and Harmony of Colours (London: A. J. Valpy, 1817). American Art/National Portrait Gallery Library, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. of primary (red-yellow-blue), secondary (orange-purple-green), and tertiary (russet-olive-citrine) colors constituted harmonic, tonal syntheses of the lightdark principles that descended from Genesis 1:3–5, when God originally brought light out of darkness to create nature’s variegated carpet of visual forms.12 In accord with Field’s triadic system, Cole’s dramatic sky appears to trace a symbolic progression of color and light. Beginning with the low, olive-gray storm clouds on the left, The Oxbow brightens as it curves away from this dark tertiary zone, sweeping through the secondarycolor purplish clouds toward the primary, sunlit blue sky pierced by a pyramidal mountain of white clouds. Signifying the heavenly realm of the Almighty, this aerial peak dwarfs the earthly hills and mountains below. The colorful arc of clouds visually corresponds with the elliptical, mirroring oxbow at the heart of Cole’s composition. Sometime after 1835, perhaps before creating The Oxbow, Cole copied the schematic color wheel that served as the frontispiece to Field’s treatise Chromatography (1835) (figs. 6, 7). The title page of Field’s earlier Chromatics: Or an Essay on the Analogy and Harmony of Colours (1817) offered another significant symbol: it featured the hermetic emblem of a snake biting its own tail encompassing a hexagram formed by two overlapping triangles (fig. 8). For Field, the ouroboros, or circular serpent, both symbolized the color wheel and represented the colorful, regenerative cycles of nature. The ouroboros, commonly identified in alchemy with the so-called philosopher’s stone or the protean, silvery, mirrorlike qualities of liquid mercury, symbolizes the elemental flux of earth, water, air, and fire. As an emblem of perfection it here surrounds a hexagram, the “Seal of Solomon,” modified into light and dark triangles that signify Field’s universal 68 Spring 2006 This content downloaded from 198.091.037.002 on April 14, 2017 21:09:00 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 9 Thomas Cole, View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow (detail), 1836 10 Thomas Cole, Self-Portrait, ca. 1836. Oil, 22 x 18 in. New-York Historical Society triadic color relationships and syntheses of light-dark, heaven-earth opposites. In his “Essay on American Scenery,” published just before he painted The Oxbow, Cole employed the language of alchemy and a rainbowlike arch to describe America’s “unsurpassed” skies: “At sunset the serene arch is filled with alchemy that transmutes mountains, and streams, and temples into living gold.” A short paragraph later, he anticipated The Oxbow and its southwestern sky by describing how, in the wake of a thundershower, “low purple clouds hang in festoons around the steeps” of “western mountains.” In Cole’s Oxbow, a colorful semicircular band of clouds moving from dark to light sweeps over a landscape divided by wilderness and pastoral views. From the river valley below, a serpentine body expands outward to mediate between the opposing spatial halves.13 69 Contemporary geologists and travel writers remarked that the Connecticut River near Northampton assumed the appearance of a giant “serpentine band of silver” or “serpentine mirror” when viewed from Mount Holyoke’s summit. In his “Essay on American Scenery,” Cole praised the Connecticut River’s “gentle aspect” winding along the “Arcadian vales” near Northampton.14 However, Cole intended viewers of The Oxbow to gaze on not only the peaceful Connecticut River valley but also the stormy summit of Mount Holyoke and a diminutive representation of the artist himself (fig. 9), which may be compared with a small Self-Portrait Cole sketched the same year (fig. 10). In the landscape, Cole portrayed himself turned away from his easel and the panoramic valley view. He pauses in his work to look backward and upward over his shoulder, returning our downward gaze. American Art This content downloaded from 198.091.037.002 on April 14, 2017 21:09:00 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 11 William Rollinson, Lodge Certificate for Independent Royal Arch Lodge No. 2, New York City, ca. 1795. Engraving. Van GordenWilliams Library and Archives, National Heritage Museum, Lexington, Massachusetts Despite the small size of Cole’s figure, our attention is drawn to it with touches of bright red paint delineating a hat band and the scarlet lining or sash of a cloak flung over his shoulder. The painting’s central motif, the oxbow, with its narrow peninsula or isthmus of land, points directly toward the artist. Furthermore, the oxbow’s elliptical curve expands beyond the valley to embrace the artist framed by roughly shaped wings of stone architecture. From the top of one stone wing, Cole’s tall parasol visually crosses the distant river and leans into the oxbow’s curve, setting in motion a greater compositional circle that unites wilderness summit with pastoral view. Cole points with a gleaming, loaded paintbrush toward his head and, more specifically, toward his dark, visionary eyes. The painter’s backward glance seems an analogue for the notion that the landscape itself returns our gaze. Indeed, the great river bend could typologically signify the providential eye of the “inimitable Artist” or Creator, who impresses on nature images of his divine, authorial presence. Several art historians have also contended that Hebraic letters can be perceived on the low hill that gently rises along the horizon above and beyond the oxbow (see fig. 9). Right side up, the letters approximate the biblical name “NOAH.” Upside down, from the perspective of the heavenly sphere, the name “SHADDAI” or the “Almighty” reveals itself. These cryptic, Hebraic-appearing markings invite beholders to interpret the painting in scriptural, hieroglyphic terms. The Masonic Mirror’s metaphorical coupling of Mount Holyoke with the sacred, biblical “mountains of Judea” suggests a potentially receptive audience for the 70 artist’s calligraphic evocation of the Old Testament and the Holy Land.15 In a lecture written for, but apparently not delivered to, the National Academy of Design, Cole argued that all human languages had roots in ancient Hebrew and that Hebraic letters imitated nature in the same manner as painting, drawing, or “the Arts of Design.” Each Hebraic letter represented “some object, or animal, whose spoken name commenced with it.”16 Cole’s subtle, almost seamless blending of Hebraic, scriptural lettering and landscape forms implies that the traditional sisterhood of visual and verbal arts originated in nature and the Bible, twin revelations of God’s Word. The thunderstorm passing over the left side of the canvas diminishes and brightens toward the right. Mediating between light and dark halves of the painting, prismatic, purplish clouds arch above Noah’s name to evoke the subsiding of the biblical Flood. Spring 2006 This content downloaded from 198.091.037.002 on April 14, 2017 21:09:00 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). The suggestive Hebraic inscription of “Noah” and the “Almighty” on a hill immediately above the ocular oxbow invites associations with Masonic lodge certificates, which routinely paired the all-seeing eye of God with Hebraic letters signifying God’s “Ineffable Name” (fig. 11). Freemasonry and Solomon’s Temple During the summer of 1822, long before he painted The Oxbow, twentyone-year-old Thomas Cole became a Freemason, joining the Lodge of Amity No. 5 in Zanesville, Ohio. Many American artists and architects during the early republic found it economically and socially advantageous to enter the fraternity. Itinerant artists especially depended on the welcoming handshakes of lodge brothers as they traveled from one unfamiliar town to the next. For financially strapped itinerants like Cole, lodge members could be expected to commission paintings, lend money and assistance, and provide helpful personal references. Indeed, Northampton native Benjamin Tappan, who had given Cole art supplies, belonged to a Masonic lodge in Steubenville, Ohio. Having become a prominent jurist, Tappan may have referred Cole to lodge brothers in nearby Zanesville, where the young painter rapidly progressed through the three craft degrees of Freemasonry: Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft, and Master Mason. As religious, philosophically “speculative” gentlemen, modern Freemasons, appropriating the ancient legends of medieval stonemasons, claimed possession of powerful craft secrets traceable to the building of Solomon’s Temple, one of the architectural wonders of the world, and earlier to Noah’s ark, the sturdy “floating castle” that had survived the Flood. The hidden design secrets of God’s original creation were said to have been preserved for 71 future rediscovery thanks to Noah and his progeny.17 Freemasonry was one of many fraternal and benevolent societies that influenced American life in this period, creating communities of men who shared common moral and religious beliefs and providing the society and security of a larger group. By 1825 approximately one hundred thousand Freemasons were meeting in local and “grand” state lodges throughout the United States. New York State alone could count some five hundred Masonic lodges. Freemasons enforced no religious orthodoxy, insisting only on brothers’ acknowledgment of a divine “Architect” or providential creator. Their meetings and lodges were characterized by a body of rituals and symbols, revealed only to members. During initiation for the Entered Apprentice degree, for example, Cole would have endured a disorienting pilgrimage in quest of God’s light. He would have been partially undressed, blindfolded, collared by a rope, threatened with torture and death (if he revealed Masonic secrets), and led clockwise around the lodge space following the cardinal points of the compass and the course of the sun. At the end, the lodge master would have pronounced the words from Genesis 1:3, “And God said let there be light, and there was light.” Whereupon the blindfold would have been stripped away and Cole’s new brothers would have clapped hands and stomped the floor with their feet. The thunderous noise and sudden blinding light were intended as a sublime, revelatory experience. Amity Lodge commissioned Cole to paint an emblematic Masonic carpet, the lodge’s first such carpet, which would have been placed on the floor during initiation rituals. Though Cole’s twenty-dollar carpet has been lost, it was likely similar to a contemporary model for these decorative teaching devices engraved by Connecticut artist American Art This content downloaded from 198.091.037.002 on April 14, 2017 21:09:00 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 12 Amos Doolittle, Master’s Carpet. Engraving, from Jeremy Cross, The True Masonic Chart (New Haven: John C. Gray, 1820). Van Gorden-Williams Library and Archives, National Heritage Museum, Lexington, Massachusetts and Freemason Amos Doolittle (fig. 12). Doolittle’s engraving was published in Jeremy Cross’s True Masonic Chart in an attempt to standardize Masonic symbols and rituals. A schematic representation of Solomon’s Temple presided over by a providential all-seeing eye anchors a field of diverse visual signs. The coffin emblem at the bottom of Doolittle’s engraving represents initiation for the Master Mason’s third degree, in which the candidate reenacts the death, burial, and resurrection of Masonry’s legendary character Hiram Abif, the brutally murdered, Christ-like builder of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. In a manner parallel to a born-again Christian experience, the initiate for this “sublime” degree is spiritually regenerated, released from the dark of the grave into the immortal light of divine wisdom. For Cole, Charles Talbot, and other American Protestants, whether Masons or not, Solomon’s Temple was 72 an Old Testament type, heralding the coming of Christ and the building of a heavenly New Jerusalem. Indeed, Cole’s Oxbow represents a visionary landscape shaped by the biblical, religious imagery of Solomon’s Temple. The deeply religious artist would have been attracted to the panoramic, circular language of the Hebrew prophet Ezekiel, God’s designated “watchman” (Ezekiel 3:17), who situated the temple, the city of Jerusalem, and the “house of Israel” on a high “holy mountain” (20:40). While numbingly recording architectural measurements of temple chambers, doors, posts, porches, courts, and altars (chapters 40–43), Ezekiel more poetically envisioned waters or rivers emanating from underneath Solomon’s Temple (47:1–13). The rivers, suggesting the healing powers of God’s grace, transform the surrounding wilderness desert into a countryside teeming with fish, fruit, and “trees for meat.”18 The oxbow form at the center of Cole’s composition suggests the pastoral origins of Solomon’s Temple. The word “oxbow” denotes a semicircular river bend shaped like the bowed wooden collar of a yoked ox. Whether referring to a slow-moving river bend or the animal yoke, the oxbow form connotes nature tamed and harnessed for human use. In turn, it could signify human submission to God. Biblical texts record that Solomon’s Temple was built on an oxen-powered threshing floor belonging to a gentile named Ornan the Jebusite (I Chronicles 21:15–30). Solomon’s predecessor, King David, initially purchased the threshing floor as a site on which to construct an altar. David also acquired Ornan’s yoked oxen for slaughter and the wooden threshing machinery for fuel to perform a burnt sacrifice. For Christians, the threshing floor became a symbolically important foundation for Solomon’s Temple because it prophetically invited non-Jewish peoples, personified by Ornan the Jebusite, also to worship Spring 2006 This content downloaded from 198.091.037.002 on April 14, 2017 21:09:00 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Jehovah, who would send a Messiah to all humankind. As a metaphor for the conversion of gentile peoples, Ornan’s threshing floor reinforced the expansive river imagery of Ezekiel’s prophecy to suggest the outward emanation of God’s Word beyond the limits of the Jewish temple. Thus English Puritan author Samuel Lee published a frontispiece for his Orbis miraculum, or The Temple of Solomon (London, 1659) in which a meandering, serpentine river and its branches frame a miniature, churchlike model of Solomon’s Temple (fig. 13). This river connects the engraving’s bird’s-eye view of the Holy Land and temple site to Saint John the Evangelist’s island of Patmos at the top of the composition, where John, the visionary author of the book of Revelation, gazes toward a Christian heavenly Jerusalem. The stream of prophetic words from his mouth snake upward toward the celestial 13 Frontispiece, Samuel Lee, Orbis miraculum, or The Temple of Solomon (London, 1659). Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 73 city, mimicking the circuitous flow of the sacred waters below. Oxen were “creatures of empire,” key for the advancement of European, Christian civilization in New England. These powerful, yoked animals crucially cleared the wilderness of its dense forests, underbrush, rocks, and stones, which had once harbored Native American huntsmen and untamed varieties of beasts such as bears and wolves, predators dangerous for domesticated livestock. During the early nineteenth century, the Northampton area’s Agricultural Society sponsored annual plowing matches that tested the “strength and discipline” of competing oxen teams. Meanwhile, oxen also advanced the local tourist industry by laboriously hauling lumber to the top of Mount Holyoke for construction of the first mountain house.19 According to the treatises of Samuel Lee and that of the more famous Puritan John Bunyan, Solomon’s Temple Spiritualized (1688), Solomon’s Temple encompassed apparent geographic opposites: a lowly ox-powered threshing floor and the sublime, lofty Mount Moriah, the mountain on which the Jewish patriarch Abraham nearly sacrificed his son Isaac before God stayed his hand. Lee sometimes identified Mount Zion as the temple site. The geographically imprecise name “Zion” was virtually synonymous with the whole city of Jerusalem. But Lee, in Orbis miraculum (1659), insisted that Mount Moriah was the more accurate, specific name for the temple mount, since II Chronicles 3:1 states that Solomon’s Temple rested on both “mount Moriah” and “the threshing floor of Ornan the Jebusite.” Though “Moriah” possessed a number of possible etymological sources, Lee concluded that it most truly derived from the Hebrew word meaning “to see.” Moriah was, therefore, “the land of vision.” For travelers to this land of vision, the “eminent conspicuousness” of American Art This content downloaded from 198.091.037.002 on April 14, 2017 21:09:00 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 14 After William Henry Bartlett, View from Mount Holyoke. Lithograph in Edward Hitchcock, Sketch of the Scenery of Massachusetts (Northampton, Massachusetts: J. H. Butler, 1842), following page 16. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. the holy mount made it visible from “a very great distance.” Meanwhile, from Moriah’s summit, “many rare and lovely prospects, presented themselves to the covetous eyes of delighted spectators; whereby is shadowed the rare beauty and comeliness of the church, the spouse of Christ.”20 Just as Solomon’s Temple embraced visual and conceptual opposites, lowly threshing floor versus lofty Mount Moriah, Cole’s abrupt juxtaposition of Mount Holyoke and the oxbow below creates a vertiginous, “concealed abyss” or “virtually perpendicular” descent. The compositional high-low divide suggests a difficult, seemingly impossible passage between foreground and background spaces. In contrast to Basil Hall’s View from Mount Holyoke (see fig. 2), Cole’s tense union of high hill and low vale obscures the tiny village of Hockanum situated between Mount Holyoke and the Connecticut River. Only the horsepowered Hockanum ferry crossing the river in the lower right corner of Cole’s landscape suggests the presence of the otherwise invisible community.21 Cole’s elision of Hockanum and the mountain house also diminished evidence of the tourist trade in contrast 74 to more topographical, contemporaneous representations of the view from Mount Holyoke (fig. 14). Though wary of overdevelopment, Cole acknowledged land-clearing oxen as creatures necessary for the advancement of civilization in his own Course of Empire: The Arcadian or Pastoral State (fig. 15). Following the initial panel representing the “savage state” of wild game hunting, this second Course of Empire composition includes in the far left middle ground a plowman silhouetted against distant blue water. The farmer drives a team of yoked oxen to prepare a field for early summer planting. As a wealthy wholesale grocery merchant, Reed, the patron of the series, would have admired this idealized image of agricultural labor. Infrared photographs of The Oxbow reveal that Cole painted over a drawing for the Consummation panel (see fig. 5), the third composition in the Course of Empire Series in which civilization nearly erases the natural landscape. View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm attracted Charles Talbot, who, as we have seen, was a financier invested in Northampton’s industrial development and America’s imperial growth. Like Ornan the Jebusite, who received the “full price” of “six hundred shekels of gold” for his threshing floor, machinery, and oxen (I Chronicles 21:24–25), Talbot saw no conflict between monetary profit and religious devotion. Convinced that his investment in silk manufacturing would strengthen Northampton’s traditional agrarian economy, Talbot may have seen Cole’s synthesis of wilderness and pastoral states as an expression of conservative Christian stewardship. Cole’s Oxbow proposed an image of socioeconomic development as an alternative to the overheated, overbuilt urban decadence represented in Course of Empire: Consummation. In lieu of representing Northampton’s actual urban presence, Cole drew on Puritan Spring 2006 This content downloaded from 198.091.037.002 on April 14, 2017 21:09:00 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 15 Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: The Arcadian or Pastoral State, 1836. Oil on canvas, 39 ¼ x 63 ¼ in. New-York Historical Society metaphors of the ancient Israelites’ wilderness and pastoral economies to portray a rural American Zion untainted by the deleterious effects of commercial, industrial growth. Talbot and Christian Philanthropy Uncomfortable with harsh Calvinist doctrines of humanity’s innate depravity, Talbot identified with New School Calvinist theologians, who argued that individuals possess a natural moral sense and ability to initiate spiritual rebirth. He participated in voluntary, interdenominational missionary and reform societies to construct a New Jerusalem, or Christian kingdom, on earth. With his business partner David W. C. Olyphant, Talbot supported the American Bible Society, the American Board of 75 Commissioners for Foreign Missions, and other religious, philanthropic groups. Together, they mixed commerce and evangelical proselytizing to the degree that the branch office of Talbot, Olyphant & Company in Canton, China, was widely known as “Zion’s Corner,” a gathering place for merchants and Christian missionaries.22 Trained in New England seminaries and colleges, most of the young missionaries sponsored by the American Board were recruited from the inland, western towns, villages, and farms of New England and upstate New York, where the Second Great Awakening’s spirit of religious revivalism burned brightly. The American Board traced its vision of foreign missions to an 1806 Haystack Prayer Meeting held by a small group of Williams College students known as the Brethren. This secretive, American Art This content downloaded from 198.091.037.002 on April 14, 2017 21:09:00 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). quasi-Masonic student fraternity inspired the idea of a national interdenominational organization to spread the word of God worldwide, the quicker to realize Christ’s millennial reign. Talbot, who offered missionary Brethren free passage to China aboard company ships, would have heard how the Haystack Prayer Meeting had taken place during a thunderstorm in a meadow against the backdrop of the Berkshire Hills, little more than fifty miles northwest of Northampton. With its passing thunderstorm and golden farmlands adjacent to a sublime mountain summit, Cole’s Oxbow may have triggered associations with the spectacular wilderness/pastoral setting of the celebrated Williams College event. Northampton had also been the birthplace of the First Great Awakening of religious revivalism sparked by the charismatic preaching there of Jonathan Edwards in the 1730s and 1740s.23 Virtually all American Protestants identifying with ancient Israel’s sacred history and geography regarded the temple in Jerusalem as a symbol for nation building. Besides the Bible, other ancient texts became popular sources for those seeking knowledge about the construction of Solomon’s original temple. Published during the early republic, illustrated American editions of the works of Flavius Josephus, famed first-century C.E. Jewish historian, included representations of the temple by New York engraver Alexander Anderson (fig. 16). Anderson, Cole’s eventual colleague at the National Academy of Design, characterized the palatial temple in both wilderness and pastoral terms. He situated a pair of oxen in the immediate right foreground of the relatively empty forecourt perspective grid and lined the temple’s roofline with coniferous-appearing trees, suggesting the “cedars of Lebanon,” the durable wood favored by Solomon (Song of Solomon 5:15) and interpreted by Ezekiel (17:22–24) as a messianic symbol. Around the time Cole painted The Oxbow, the Canajoharie and Catskill Railroad felled trees in New York’s Catskill Mountains in its westward expansion. Cole was angered by what he considered the remorseless destruction of “an ancient grove of cedar” near 16 Alexander Anderson, An exact representation of Solomon’s Temple. Engraving from The Whole, Genuine and Complete Works of Flavius Josephus the Learned and Authentic Jewish Historian, trans. George Henry Maynard (Philadelphia: Archibald Woodruff and William Pechin, 1795), facing page 119. Georgetown University Library, Washington, D.C. 76 Spring 2006 This content downloaded from 198.091.037.002 on April 14, 2017 21:09:00 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). The American Saint Luke 17 Coat of Arms of the Antients [sic] Grand Lodge of England, mid1700s. Oil on wood. United Grand Lodge of England, London his studio. Arguing in his “Essay on American Scenery” that “prophets of old retired into the solitudes of nature to wait the inspiration of heaven,” Cole could have associated the memory of Catskill’s beloved cedar trees with Solomon’s Temple or, alternatively, with Solomon’s related, cedar-constructed “house of the forest of Lebanon” (I Kings 7:2). In his Discourse of the House of the Forest of Lebanon (1692), Bunyan had interpreted this distinctive palace of Solomon’s as a Christian type for the embattled wilderness church. Particularly relevant for Cole’s bitter response to the modern railroad’s seemingly sacrilegious logging of ancient trees, Bunyan compared the persecuted members of his Puritan faith to the burned and cut-down state of “Lebanon’s mighty cedars.”24 77 Alexander Anderson, an engraver of Masonic lodge certificates, had appropriated his conception of Solomon’s Temple from Masonic-inspired prints published during the early eighteenth century in London. The prints represented imaginative reconstructions of Solomon’s Temple that ultimately descended from Juan Bautista Villalpando, a late-sixteenthcentury Spanish Jesuit whose famed version of the temple appeared in his commentaries on the book of Ezekiel. At the beginning of his prophetic visions, before his later detailed descriptions of Solomon’s Temple, Ezekiel encountered “by the river of Chebar” a heavenly chariot pulled by four fantastic winged creatures, each with four faces representing respectively a man, a lion, an ox, and an eagle (1:1–10). By the mid-eighteenth century in England, emblems for these figures from Ezekiel appeared on the coat of arms for the Grand Lodge of Ancient Free and Accepted Masons (fig. 17).25 This Grand Lodge of “the Ancients” became dominant in American Freemasonry because of its more socially inclusive membership and claims to more “ancient” esoteric secrets as exemplified by Ezekiel’s vision. The heraldic ox appears within the upper right quadrant of the central armorial shield. The ox helps guard a crest comprising the Ark of the Holy Covenant flanked by two winged, cloven-hoofed cherubim from the sanctum sanctorum, or Holy of Holies, within Solomon’s Temple. The ark is capped by a lofty evergreen tree beneath a providential, all-seeing eye, a reminder for Masons that Solomon’s Temple first arose in an isolated wilderness. Drawn by the four-winged, four-faced creatures, Ezekiel’s fiery chariot raced swiftly. “The noise of their wings” was “like the noise of great waters” or “the voice of the Almighty [Shaddai]” (1:24). For Christians, Ezekiel’s visionary man, lion, ox, and eagle traditionally American Art This content downloaded from 198.091.037.002 on April 14, 2017 21:09:00 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 18 French, anonymous, Saint Luke Painting the Virgin, 1430–35. Illuminated manuscript, 8 ⅜ x 6 ¼ in. Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland symbolized the four evangelists, or writers of the Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John respectively. Cole would have identified himself with the ox of Saint Luke, since by legend Luke was a painter, a portraitist of the Virgin Mary, and appeared as such in medieval illuminated manuscripts (fig. 18) and later panel paintings. European painters’ guilds and academies of art adopted Saint Luke as their patron. Commemorative medals for the Academy of Saint Luke in Rome represented the evangelist at his easel painting a vision of the Virgin, as a docile ox rests in the background. In 1831 Cole attended classes and exhibited at the Academy of Saint Luke in Florence, Italy. At the Florentine academy, he began to compose his largest, most ambitious work, The Angel Appearing to the Shepherds (fig. 19), based on the Gospel of Luke (2:8–15).26 In the View from Mount Holyoke, the oxbow, like Saint Luke’s ox, functions as a symbolic, inspirational presence behind the artist’s back. From above the oxbow, Cole, a latter-day Saint Luke, gazes upward not simply to return the panoptic gaze of the viewer but, more important, to suggest an all-seeing divine creator beyond this fallen world. Further suggesting the New Testament Gospels, the tortured storm-blasted trees in Cole’s dark foreground atop Mount Holyoke invite typological associations with Christ’s sacrificial suffering and death. In fact, the artist created a scene evocative of the Lamentation over Christ’s body, a Pietà in which a tall tree on the left side of the composition seems to reach out and comfort a dying, hollowed-out tree, its bark largely stripped as it falls toward the left. Meanwhile, a blasted third tree leans rightward toward the oxbow. Its fallen trunk leads our eye toward the small figure of Cole seated between two great outcroppings of rock (see fig. 9). His lower body hidden from view, Cole emerges from the sepulchral earth amid animating signs of 78 regeneration and spiritual energy. The dead or dying trees are covered with mossy vegetation and surrounded by green ferns. Tiny dabs of blue paint in the gray rocks and near Cole suggest blooming wildflowers. Swirls of glowing, golden brown paint forming knots and gnarls at the base of the leftward-leaning, dying tree represent the vigorous creative energy of the artist, a pilgrim to this holy site. Cole’s religious piety deepened during the mid-1830s after he began courting his future wife, Maria Bartow, who lived on her uncle’s Cedar Grove estate in the village of Catskill. Though he had long identified with Calvinist dissenters from the Anglican tradition, Cole would eventually join his wife as a member of Saint Luke’s Episcopal Church in Catskill. His devotion to Saint Luke’s led him to redesign the church after it burned down in 1839. The artist’s choice of a vertical, Gothic architectural style associated his parish church with the legendary forested origins of Gothic tradition and Christian spiritual longing for life beyond the visible world.27 Spring 2006 This content downloaded from 198.091.037.002 on April 14, 2017 21:09:00 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 19 Thomas Cole, The Angel Appearing to the Shepherds, 1833–34. Oil, 101 ½ x 185 ½ in. Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia, Gift of Walter P. Chrysler Jr. in memory of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch Cole did not focus his faith on theological, doctrinal debates. His was an evangelical, ecumenical religion that sought to transcend sectarian strife. Masonic lodge membership would have strengthened Cole’s ecumenical views. By the time he was preparing to paint The Oxbow, the artist had reconnected with friends in Zanesville, Ohio, finally repaying debts owed to those, including lodge brothers, who had lent him money during the summer of 1822.28 Wars of Culture and Race Given his gratitude for the financial assistance that had sustained his fledgling painting career, Cole must have been distressed by the violent rhetoric of the 79 anti-Masonic movement during the late 1820s and 1830s. Besieged Freemasons in New York, led by Cole’s patron Stephen Van Rensselaer, grand master of the state’s grand lodge, tried to deflect charges of irreligion from critics by organizing, joining, and administering interdenominational religious and moral reform societies. Anti-Masonic populism undercut the political efforts of wealthy New York merchants, Charles Talbot and David W. C. Olyphant included, to oppose the perceived antibusiness, dictatorial policies of President Andrew Jackson. Members of the Anti-Masonic Party, the first third-party movement in American history, campaigned to bar Freemasons from holding political office, arguing that their blood-curdling initiation oaths swearing undying loyalty American Art This content downloaded from 198.091.037.002 on April 14, 2017 21:09:00 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 20 Attributed to Thomas Cole, Prince Immanuel’s triumphal Entry into the town of Mansoul, 1818. Wood engraving in John Bunyan, A true relation of the Holy War made by King Shaddai upon Diabolus, for the Regaining of the Metropolis of the World; or the losing and taking again of the Town of Mansoul (Philadelphia: McCarty and Davis, 1818), opposite page 182. Sinclair Hamilton Collection, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library, Princeton, New Jersey to the private fraternity took subversive precedence over public, civic duties. More broadly, populist anti-Masons also sharply criticized the power of private voluntary associations in general. They argued that wealthy, supposedly charitable, private groups contributed only to a self-interested corporate establishment suspiciously hidden from the watchful republican scrutiny of yeomen farmers, mechanics, and ordinary working men.29 Opposed to the antiestablishment sectarianism of anti-Masonry, Cole saw the relatively nondoctrinaire religious voluntary associations as a natural, potential constituency for his art. During Anniversary Week in 1834, when members of the various associations congregated in New York City for their annual business meetings, the New York Commercial Advertiser, a pro-Masonic, anti-Jackson newspaper, promoted Cole’s art with the pious, out-of-town visitor 80 in mind. Talbot, whose name sometimes appeared in the pages of the Commercial Advertiser, may have noticed a short preview of the 1836 National Academy of Design exhibition lauding Cole’s “superb landscapes,” following an article praising Whig politician and unrepentant Freemason Henry Clay.30 Later, with The Oxbow in public view at the academy, the Commercial Advertiser published a poem, “The Divine Omnipotence,” in its June 25, 1836, edition. From the center of the front page, the poem, framed by municipal government news and commodity market reports, exhorts readers to “Look up to the soft blue sky,” “[l]ook around thee on this spacious earth,” and “survey the billowy, boundless deep.” By deploying an active, panoramic gaze, the “omnipresent God” will be revealed in both high and low spaces, a poetic complement to Cole’s painting. More explicitly, the April 27, 1836, issue of the New York Evening Post praised The Oxbow’s “Great Bend” and the picture’s religious, quasi-liturgical content, observing that “mists are rising like altar smoke from the hills in the distance.” Cole’s panoptic View from Mount Holyoke expressed spiritual communion with nature’s hieroglyphic forms and the hopeful prospect of America as a new Jerusalem. Cole, in his “Essay on American Scenery,” implicitly invoked oxen as symbols of Christian domesticity: “Where the wolf roams, the plough shall glisten; on the gray crag shall rise temple and tower.” Perhaps Talbot, who helped finance translations of the Bible into several languages, also saw Hebraic letters in the hills of Cole’s Oxbow. Cole’s vision of ancient Hebrew as a virtually universal language organically stemming from the hieroglyphs of nature seems to rescue the notion of providential unity from a dizzying, foreign Babel of diversity.31 But the dual names Noah and Shaddai, imperfectly inscribed on The Spring 2006 This content downloaded from 198.091.037.002 on April 14, 2017 21:09:00 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Photo Credits 60–61, 69 (left), Photos © 1995 Metropolitan Museum of Art; 64 (middle and bottom), Photos © 2002 Detroit Institute of Arts; 66, NYHS 1858.3; 68 (top), Photo by Richard Caspole; 68 (middle), Photo © 1970 Trustees of Princeton University; 69 (right), NYHS 1964.41; 70, Photo by David Bohl; 72, Photo by John Miller; 75, NYHS 1858.2; 77, © United Grand Lodge of England, Reproduced by permission; 78, Photo © Walters Art Museum, Baltimore; 79, Photo © Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Va., 80.30 Oxbow’s sharply divided composition, suggest division and ongoing conflict on the path toward salvation. As a vision of struggle between the forces of darkness and light, the landscape recalls another Puritan religious allegory, which appeared in numerous American editions during the early nineteenth century. At the beginning of his art career in Philadelphia, Cole had contributed engravings for an 1818 edition of John Bunyan’s The Holy War, made by Shaddai upon Diabolus, for the Regaining of the Metropolis of the World; or, the losing and taking again of the Town of Mansoul (1682). In this Christian allegory of the ongoing war between good and evil, Bunyan’s King Shaddai (the “Almighty” Creator) and his son Prince Immanuel (Christ) defend the city of Mansoul (Jerusalem) and its morally flawed citizens against the invading forces of wily Diabolus (Satan) through a series of victories and defeats before the final triumph of heavenly forces. Fueling the racial fears and anxieties of Cole and other antebellum American readers of the Holy War, the Puritan author described Diabolus as the “King of the Blacks or Negroes.” Mansoul or Jerusalem would be saved only with the extermination of this dark, evil army, thanks to the intervention of Prince Immanuel.32 One of the Bunyan illustrations attributed to Cole, Prince Immanuel’s triumphal Entry into the town of Mansoul (fig. 20), counters the ostentatious, imperial procession in Course of Empire: Consummation (see fig. 5). Like The Oxbow, Cole’s engraving for The Holy War morally contrasts with that image of decadence and corruption. Cole’s Oxbow called on men like Charles Talbot to serve as Christian crusaders, to weather life’s battles and conflicts in spiritually rebuilding Solomon’s Temple and the holy city of Jerusalem. But how and for whom was the temple to be built? Possessing no genuine faith in human perfectibility, Cole painted an unsettled work that lacked an easy, reassuring synthesis of opposites. Despite its panoptic scope, The Oxbow reminded viewers that spiritual vision remains limited in the earthly sphere. Better the lack of consummation, better a divided landscape that metaphorically expresses the difficult pilgrimage toward heavenly salvation beyond life’s transient, illusory pleasures. Notes 1 Alan Wallach, “Making a Picture of the View from Mount Holyoke,” in American Iconology: New Approaches to Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature, ed. David C. Miller (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1993), 80, 82–84. Wallach borrows the phrases “sovereign gaze” and “eye of power” from French social theorist Michel Foucault. There is a substantial body of literature on The Oxbow; see also, for instance, Marianne Doezema, ed., Changing Prospects: The View from Mount Holyoke (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 2002); Matthew Baigell and Allen Kaufman, “Thomas Cole’s ‘The Oxbow’: A Critique of American Civilization,” Arts Magazine 55 (January 1981): 136–39; and 81 eye,” see Thomas Cole, “Essay on American Scenery,” in American Art, 1700– 1960: Sources and Documents, ed. John W. McCoubrey (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1965), 109. Elwood C. Parry III, “Overlooking the Oxbow: Thomas Cole’s View from Mount Holyoke Revisited,” American Art Journal 34/35 (2003–04): 7–61. 2 I have suggested elsewhere that Masonic hieroglyphs inspired the pyramidal, cathedral-like grandeur of such mountainous landscapes as Cole’s Saint John in the Wilderness; see David Bjelajac, American Art: A Cultural History, 2nd ed. (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2005), 195–96. On typing of New World sites, see John Davis, The Landscape of Belief: Encountering the Holy Land in Nineteenth-Century American Art and Culture (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1996), 13–59. On the “mind’s 3 Thomas Cole, Catskill, N.Y., to Charles N. Talbot, New York City, June 30, 1836. Charles Nicoll Talbot Papers, microfilm reel 1297, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia (hereafter, Talbot Papers). The original papers of Talbot are owned by the Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence. 4 On differing arguments over the dating of the drawings, see Ellwood C. Parry III, The Art of Thomas Cole: Ambition and American Art This content downloaded from 198.091.037.002 on April 14, 2017 21:09:00 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Imagination (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1988), 172–76; Oswaldo Rodriguez Roque, “The Oxbow by Thomas Cole: Iconography of an American Landscape Painting,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 17 (1982): 63–73; and Wallach, “Making a Picture of the View from Mount Holyoke,” 80–91. 5 6 Elwood C. Parry III, “Thomas Cole’s Early Career: 1818–1829,” in Views and Visions: American Landscape before 1830, ed. Edward J. Nygren (Washington, D.C.: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1986), 164. Charles E. Forbes, master of Northampton’s Jerusalem Lodge, and Jonathan H. Lyman, another lodge member, were subscribers for the original house atop Mount Holyoke. Additional members of Jerusalem Lodge dominated Northampton’s Mount Holyoke Association, including Isaac C. Bates, A. S. Bugbee, Christopher Clark, Isaac Damons, Levi Lyman, chair of the association, and Joseph Strong. See also David Graci, Mt. Holyoke: An Enduring Prospect; History of New England’s Most Historic Mountain (Holyoke, Mass.: Calem Publishing Co., 1985). The unpublished “Secretary’s Minutes” for Jerusalem Lodge are at the Forbes Library, Northampton. Thomas Cole, Catskill, N.Y., to Luman Reed, New York City, March 2, 1836, in Parry, The Art of Thomas Cole, 172. Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Kevin Avery confirms that infrared photographs have revealed a drawing of Course of Empire: Consummation beneath Cole’s Oxbow. Avery, e-mail message to author, August 9, 2004; for a detailed discussion of the infrared photographs, see Parry, “Overlooking the Oxbow,” 30–44. 7 On Silas Talbot, see Henry T. Tuckerman, The Life of Silas Talbot: A Commodore in the Navy of the United States (New York: J. C. Riker, 1850), 12–15; and William M. Fowler Jr., Silas Talbot: Captain of Old Ironsides (Mystic, Conn.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1995). 8 Charles Talbot, New York City, to George W. Talbot, April 7, 1836, Talbot Papers. 9 The most valuable publication on the life of Charles Talbot is In Memoriam. C. N. T., privately printed “for the Family Circle” following his death on November 29, 1874. See Samuel Whitmarsh, Northampton, Mass., to Charles Talbot, New York City, January 16, 82 1837, and other business correspondence in the Talbot Papers. 10 The Rev. Erskine Mason, “Supports of Faith amid the Mysteries of Providence,” in A Pastor’s Legacy: Being Sermons on Practical Subjects. With a Brief Memoir of the Author, by Rev. William Adams, D.D. (New York: Charles Scribner, 1853), 145, 160. 11 “Mount Holyoke,” Masonic Mirror and Mechanic’s Intelligencer, July 9, 1825. 12 William Sidney Mount diary entries for May 4, 1848, and December 29, 1848, in William Sidney Mount, ed. Alfred Frankenstein (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1975), 186, 199. William I. Homer, “Thomas Cole and Field’s ‘Chromatography,’” Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University 19 (1960): 26–30. See also David Bjelajac, Washington Allston, Secret Societies and the Alchemy of Anglo-American Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997), 42–47, 58–59. 13 George Field, Chromatics, or an Essay on the Analogy and Harmony of Colours (London: A. J. Valpy, 1817). Cole, “Essay on American Scenery,” 108. 14 Theodore Dwight Jr., Sketches of Scenery and Manners in the United States (New York: A. T. Goodrich, 1829), 13; Cole, “Essay on American Scenery,” 106; Edward Hitchcock, Final Report on the Geology of Massachusetts (Amherst and Northampton, Mass.: J. S. & C. Adams and J. J. Butler, 1841), 243. 15 On the Hebraic letters, see Baigell and Kaufman, “Thomas Cole’s ‘The Oxbow’: A Critique of American Civilization”; Angela Miller, The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825–1875 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1993), 47–48; and Oswaldo Rodriguez Roque’s catalogue entry for Cole’s Oxbow in American Paradise: The World of the Hudson River School, ed. John K. Howat (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1987), 127. 16 Thomas Cole, “[A Lecture on Art],” in Thomas Cole, The Collected Essays and Prose Sketches, ed. Marshall Tymn (St. Paul, Minn.: John Colet Press, 1980), 105. 17 I first briefly considered Cole’s Masonic membership in Washington Allston, Secret Societies and the Alchemy of Anglo-American Painting, 131, 147. For a detailed discussion of Cole as a Freemason, see Julie L. Hughey, “Thomas Cole and the Language of Freemasonry” (MA thesis, George Washington University, 2002). Cole’s membership in the Lodge of Amity No. 5 in Zanesville is recorded in the lodge minutes for meetings held in June and July 1822. The minutes show that he became an Apprentice Freemason on June 28 and was raised to the third degree of Master Mason on July 19 after achieving the second degree that same day. The July 19 minutes state that a resolution was passed offering Cole twenty dollars to paint a Masonic carpet; see Hughey, 20. A microfilm copy of the minutes is kept by the secretary of the lodge. Cole’s membership is also recorded in published lodge histories; see J. Hope Sutor, History of the Lodge of Amity, No. 5 (Zanesville, Ohio: C. Moorehead, 1879); and Norris F. Schneider, Lodge of Amity No. 5, F. and A. M., Zanesville, Ohio: 1805–1955 (Zanesville, Ohio: Lodge of Amity, 1955). On Noah’s ark, see “Masonry, from the Flood to the Building of Solomon’s Temple,” Masonic Mirror and Mechanic’s Intelligencer, February 12, 1825. For a widely read exposé detailing Masonry’s secret initiation ceremonies, see Captain William Morgan, Exposition of Freemasonry (1827; repr., Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger Publishing’s Rare Reprints, n.d.). See also Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730–1840 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1996). 18 See Walther Zimmerli, Ezekiel: A Commentary on the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel, trans. Ronald E. Clements and James D. Martin, ed. Frank Moore Cross, Paul D. Hanson, et al., 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979, 1983). On Ezekiel’s vision and urban design in the Americas, see Brian Charles Wilson, “The New World’s Jerusalems: Franciscans, Puritans, and Sacred Space in the Colonial Americas, 1519–1820” (PhD diss., Univ. of California, Santa Barbara, 1996), 207–9; and Jaime Lara, City, Temple, Stage: Eschatological Architecture and Liturgical Theatrics in New Spain (Notre Dame, Ind.: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 2004), 91–149. 19 Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004), 83, 145–46; Spring 2006 This content downloaded from 198.091.037.002 on April 14, 2017 21:09:00 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). “Agricultural,” New England Galaxy and Masonic Magazine 3 (November 12, 1819): 17; and Graci, Mt. Holyoke, 1–3. 20 Samuel Lee, Orbis miraculum, or the Temple of Solomon, Pourtrayed by Scripture-light (London: John Streater for Francis Titon, 1659), 15, 182–83; John Bunyan, The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, gen. ed. Roger Sharrock, vol. 7, Solomon’s Temple Spiritualized; The House of the Forest of Lebanon; The Water of Life, ed. Graham Midgley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 13. A plagiarized copy of Lee’s treatise was published in the nineteenth century for the Masonic Grand Lodge of Ireland; see Christopher Kelly, Solomon’s Temple Spiritualized with an Account of Its Destruction (Dublin, Ireland: Brother William Folds, 1803). 21 For the quotes, see Edward S. Casey, Representing Place: Landscape Painting and Maps (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2002), 60–61. See also Martha Hoppin, “Depicting Mount Holyoke: A Dialogue with the Past,” in Changing Prospects, 31–35. 22 Together with David Washington Cincinnatus Olyphant, Talbot in 1828 founded Talbot, Olyphant & Co. at 66 South Street in New York and the sister house of Olyphant & Co. in Canton. On the firm’s aid to missionaries and Olyphant’s career, see Silvia S. Bennet, “Trade and Salvation: One Merchant’s Aims in China,” unpublished manuscript, 1990, New York Public Library. See also Rev. Thatcher Thayer, A Sketch of the Life of D. W. C. Olyphant (New York: Edward O. Jenkins, 1852). 23 On the Brethren, Freemasonry, and the American Board, see Clifton Jackson Phillips, Protestant America and the Pagan World: The First Half Century of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 1810–1860 (Cambridge, Mass.: East Asian Research Center, Harvard Univ., 1969), 20–31, 43, 236. 83 24 Cole’s remembrance of the cedar grove appeared in a revision of his “Essay on American Scenery” for an 1841 lecture at the Catskill Lyceum. See Alan Wallach, “Thomas Cole’s River in the Catskills as Antipastoral,” Art Bulletin 84 (June 2002): 341. See also Cole, “Essay on American Scenery,” 99; and Frederic M. Burr, Life and Works of Alexander Anderson, M.D., the First American Wood Engraver (New York: Burr Brothers, 1893), 30, 85. On Bunyan, see Richard L. Greaves, Glimpses of Glory: John Bunyan and English Dissent (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 2002), 557. In 1830 Alexander Anderson illustrated the earliest American edition of the complete works of John Bunyan; see David E. Smith, “Publication of John Bunyan’s Works in America,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 66 (December 1962): 644. 25 John D. Hamilton, Material Culture of the American Freemasons (Lexington, Mass.: Museum of Our National Heritage, 1994), 22–24, 127; W. Kirk MacNulty, Freemasonry: A Journey through Ritual and Symbol (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991), 56; Barbara Borngässer Klein, “Juan Bautista Villalpando,” in Veronica Biermann et al., Architectural Theory from the Renaissance to the Present, trans. Gregory Fauria et al. (Cologne: Taschen, 2003), 366–77. 26 Parry, The Art of Thomas Cole, 116, 149–51. See the 1775 silver commemorative medal of the Academy of Saint Luke, Rome, by Joseph Schwendimann at www.christophereimer.co.uk/ single/7887.html. 27 On Cole and the tradition of dissent, see Alan Wallach, “The Voyage of Life as Popular Art,” Art Bulletin 59 (June 1977): 234–41. On his architecture, see Parry, The Art of Thomas Cole, 206–7, 242–43. 28 In a November 4 , 1833, letter to William Althorpe Adams of Zanesville, Cole recalls one of his creditors, a “Mr. Spangler” of that town, probably Isaac Spangler, who was initiated into the Lodge of Amity No. 5 just before Cole. Cole Papers, microfilm reel ALC1, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Sutor, History of the Lodge of Amity, No. 5, 104. 29 Paul Goodman, Towards a Christian Republic: Antimasonry and the Great Transition in New England, 1826–1836 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988); Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood, 227– 319; and Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), 13–38. 30 “National Academy of Design,” New York Commercial Advertiser, April 28, 1836. For Cole’s targeting of Anniversary Week audiences, see “Cole’s Picture of the Angels,” New York Commercial Advertiser, May 7, 1834. 31 Thomas Cole, “Essay on American Scenery,” 109. On the Board of Managers for the American Bible Society, Talbot helped finance translations of the Bible into Chinese and other ideographic languages; see Elijah C. Bridgeman’s letters to Charles N. Talbot, April 5, 1836, and September 8, 1851, Talbot Papers. 32 Nancy Siegel, Along the Juniata: Thomas Cole and the Dissemination of American Landscape Imagery (Huntingdon, Pa.: The Juniata College Museum of Art, 2003), 67. John Bunyan, The Holy War, ed. Roger Sharrock and James F. Forrest (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 9. From 1794 to 1830 there were at least ten American editions of Bunyan’s Holy War, one in 1805 containing seven engravings by Alexander Anderson; see Smith, “Publication of John Bunyan’s Works in America,” 647. See also Parry, “Thomas Cole’s Early Career: 1818– 1829,” 163. American Art This content downloaded from 198.091.037.002 on April 14, 2017 21:09:00 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).