The Hudson River School’s American Apocalypse

By the standards of geological epochs, Kaaterskill Falls in Upstate New York is positively youthful. Generated by melting glacial runoff eroding the sandstone and shale at the foot of the Catskills’ South Mountain during the middle Pleistocene, a spritely 130,000 years ago, Kaaterskill is a spectacular two-stage waterfall that seems to almost bounce down its 260-foot (~79-meter) height. Two centuries ago, that cascading waterfall would inspire a 25-year-old engraver born in Lancashire, England, who wanted to forge a new American aesthetics. Thomas Cole’s “Kaaterskill Falls” of 1826, on view at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, heralded that new movement.

Painted at his nearby Cedar Grove studio, “Kaaterskill Falls” turned the portraiture that had marked late colonial and early Republican American art in the mode of Gilbert Stuart and Rembrandt Peale to the wall. Where that work was staid, decorous, classical, and European, this adopted American made a declaration of independence from the art academies of London and Paris. Seemingly painted from the perspective of the rock-shelter behind the falls itself, the work depicts powerful water flowing into the creek below, framed by autumnal leaves of Eastern Hemlocks, Northern Red Oaks, Sugar Maples, and American Beeches rendered in green, red, orange, and brown. Through the mist and haze of the water droplets, the sun drops into a bleeding dusk, nightfall moving in with the black clouds. “The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is astonishment,” wrote the Anglo-Irish philosopher Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful from 1757. A clarion call to the emerging Romantic movement, Burke’s claims about sublimity were first truly embodied in the American landscape, the only patrimony the young Republic had yet to offer.