A Curatorial Perspective on Two Objects

Artist Thomas Cole and poet William Cullen Bryant were contemporaries and close friends, and their artistic practices were predicated on similar notions of Anglo-American entitlement to the North American landscape. They both worked to establish the American cultural identity as one shaped by, and contingent on, a pristine natural environment. Their works reveal anxieties about the encroachment of industry on the land, but also reenforce white American claims to the territory.

They depicted the landscape through inherited European lenses (Cole and Bryant were deemed the American versions of Claude Lorraine and William Wordsworth respectively), and as pastoral precisely at the moment that New England was rapidly industrializing. Moreover, they depicted the traditional caretakers of the land, indigenous Americans, as if they existed only in the past, what became known as the myth of the “vanishing Indian.” In fact, he Indian Removal Act of 1830 had forcefully relocated many Indigenous Americans west of the Mississippi.

Thomas Cole’s Portage Falls on the Genesee depicts the Genesse River valley right before the construction of a proposed canal system that would permanently alter the landscape. Cole is capturing a scene that will soon be lost. The lightning-blasted tree, and heavy storm clouds suggest a violent and sudden change. Cole situates himself within the scene, seated on a cliff in the lower left quadrant of the canvas, as a final witness to the site as it once was. He casts himself as the lone mourner of the scene, and by doing so, asserts himself-- and by proxy his class of artists and writers—as the only cohort to see the true beauty of the land.

William Cullen Bryant’s poem The Fountain is addressed to-- and tells the story of-- a stream in a New England forest over the course of hundreds of years. The water in Bryant’s poem bears witness to significant changes in the landscape and reflects three distinct uses ofnature. In the early pages, the animals who drink from the stream leave only footprints on the banks; the Native Americans in the story (from an unidentified nation, and an unspecified time “centuries” in the past) are seen in conflict with one another, and their blood soils the clean water and turns it crimson; last, even though the European colonial settlers clear the forests, the stream in their part of the story remains “crystal” clear, and the scenes they inhabit are idyllic and quiet. In the final section, Bryant expresses fears that increased industrialization will “deform” the land and “choke” the lifeforms once abundant there.

Exhibition page.