The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Thomas Cole · View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm, the title as exhibited, known as The Oxbow · oil on canvas, about 130.8 by 193 cm, about 1.48 to 1 · a panorama from a summit over a river valley, cut by a diagonal from upper left to lower right: a withdrawing thunderstorm over a wild wooded crest at the left, a sunlit cultivated plain with the river’s loop at the right, and the painter small at his easel on the wild side · painted 1836 · The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York · the work scored is the single canvas as it now hangs; the painter’s sketches and earlier printed views from the same summit are context
Mode
The topographical view from a known lookout made to carry an argument; the European ideal landscape in its two modes, the wild and the ordered, set side by side across one line
Mythos
The garden and the wilderness, Eden and the world outside it, built in the diagonal; the Deluge passing in the storm; the covenant after the flood, if the letters some scholars read on the far hill are granted
Phase
After a thunderstorm, the time the title names: the storm withdrawing, the light breaking from under the cloud, the clearing under way; painted 1836
Presentation
Oil on a canvas of about 130.8 by 193 cm, a large exhibition canvas for American painting of its year; the storm and the light along the diagonal in close tonal control, the far valley in fine legible detail, the foreground in the formula of the period
Register
Two sublimes in one field, the dread of the storm and the serenity of the lit distance, and between them a judgment left open
Scale
A whole valley seen from a summit, fields and farms at the scale of a map, and one human figure large enough to read, the painter
Governing Proposition
A canvas about 1.3 metres high and nearly two wide looks down from the summit of Mount Holyoke over the Connecticut River valley, where the river turns back on itself in a loop. One diagonal from the upper left to the lower right divides it. Above and to the left a thunderstorm withdraws over a wooded crest, a broken tree in the near ground; below and to the right the cleared plain lies in sunlight, fields in patches, small farms, threads of smoke. On the wild side, small, the painter sits at his easel and looks back over his shoulder at us. The wager of the canvas is that a view from a known lookout can carry an argument: that two modes of landscape painting can be made two conditions of a nation’s land, held at once, with the line between them moving only one way and the viewer set on the summit beside the one who must choose.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The canvas is oil, painted in 1836, about 130.8 by 193 centimetres, a little under half again as wide as it is high and about two and a half square metres in all: a large exhibition canvas by the measure of American painting in its year. It was exhibited under the title View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm, and it is known as The Oxbow, after the loop the river makes below the summit. It hangs in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The work scored is this one canvas as it now hangs. The painter’s sketches, and the earlier printed views from the same summit, are context and are not scored.
What it shows takes a few sentences. From the top of the mountain the view opens over the valley of the Connecticut River, where the river turns back on itself. One diagonal, from the upper left corner to the lower right, cuts the field in two. At the left a thunderstorm is withdrawing over a wild, wooded crest, rain still falling from it, and a broken, storm-struck tree stands in the near ground. At the right the cleared and cultivated plain lies in sunlight: fields in patches, small farms, threads of smoke, the river’s loop at the centre of it.
In the lower foreground, small, on the wild side of the hill, the painter sits at his easel with an umbrella and gear beside him on the rock, and he has turned to look back over his shoulder at us. He is the one human figure in the picture large enough to read. The parts are few: one canvas, one viewpoint, two zones divided by one line, one figure. Everything else in the field belongs to one side of the line or the other, except the river.
Movement II
The inheritance is triple. There is the topographical view, the likeness of a named place; there is the printed panorama from a known lookout; and there is the European ideal landscape in its two modes, the wild of Salvator Rosa and the ordered of Claude. The picture sets those two modes side by side across one line: the storm and the wooded crest on one side of it, the lit plain on the other. The departure is to make the two modes mean two conditions of one land, and to put the painter into his own view as the one who has to choose between them.
That was a real turn for American painting, and the stake was modest. A view from a known lookout was a saleable kind. The painter’s risk in that decade lay in his allegorical cycles, not in this canvas, and the devices the canvas uses were all the tradition’s. A turn made with received means, on a safe subject, stands where The Swerve stands, at 7.7, the lowest of the twelve but one: the swerve is in what the picture makes the old means say, not in the means.
Set beside Claude’s Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba, at 8.2, the measure of the inheritance is plain. Claude’s harbour leads on the sublime, the form, the making, the reach, the survival and the inner law: the older master paints better and moved more. The Oxbow leads on necessity, on disclosure, on myth and on the swerve, because it gives the ordered mode a meaning Claude’s harbour does not carry. The two stand level. Constable’s The Hay Wain, at 8.0, leads on the swerve, the reach and the making, where its handling was the larger turn; The Oxbow leads on the axes of meaning and structure and stands two tenths above it.
Movement III
The diagonal is the picture’s argument, and nothing on the canvas is outside its jurisdiction. Take the storm on the wild crest at the upper left and the smoke rising from a clearing on the plain at the lower right, the two elements furthest apart: they obey one law. The land is ranked along a single line from the untouched to the used, and weather, light, vegetation and human sign are all sorted by it. The river obeys it by belonging to both halves; the painter obeys it by sitting on one side and looking across. Nothing contradicts the law. Its limit is its shape: a binary, once grasped, is complete, and The Inner Law stands at 8.4 for a coherence that is clear more than rich.
The form is the knowledge, most of it. In a text the wild comes before the cultivated or after it, and the order is a verdict. On the canvas they are simultaneous, and the line between them is where the viewer stands. The panoramic width makes the valley a land rather than a place; the high viewpoint makes the viewer an owner of the view before he knows it; the painter’s small figure, turned outward, makes the frame part of the argument. Remove the storm and the left half is only woods; remove the loop and the halves have no hinge; remove the painter and the canvas is a view. What yields is extent: the plain could lose a band, and some of the foreground foliage and rock is filler the picture permits rather than compels. The Living Form stands at 8.3 and The Inevitable at 8.1, the form received and the core opposition able to pass, with loss, into a print or a page.
The making carries the meeting. Where the storm and the light meet along the diagonal the work is a matter of tonal control: the light breaks from under the cloud onto the plain so that the sunlit half reads as distance and calm while the dark half stays close and heavy. The far valley is painted at the scale of a map, fields and farms legible, without losing the air that sets it back, and the rain in the distance is laid with restraint. The costs are in the near ground. The foreground trees and rocks are worked in a formula of the period, the broken tree is a stock device, the painter’s figure is summary, and beside the best of Turner or Constable the handling is careful rather than inventive. The Made stands at 8.4.
Movement IV
The title names the time of the picture, and the time is the meaning. The storm is passing, the clearing is under way, the smoke is rising, and the painter sits on the side that is going. What can be stated is this: a people’s relation to its land is a division it carries in itself, the one view holding the wilderness it reveres and the cultivation it is making of that wilderness, and the line between them moves only one way. The picture shows the division as a present tense, not as a choice already made, and it holds wherever land is turned to use. It is held below the highest disclosure on three counts. The meaning is carried as much by mood, storm against calm, shadow against light, as by statement; its sharpest particular needs a caption; and the picture leaves its own judgment open, which is honesty, but leaves part of the disclosure to what the viewer brings. The Unconcealment stands at 8.1.
The myth is built more than evoked. The diagonal carries the old pattern of the garden and the wilderness, Eden and the world outside it, and turns a fact of topography into a moral division. The storm passing is the Deluge passing. On the far hillside, cleared patches in the forest have been read by some scholars as Hebrew letters: Noah, read one way, and read inverted, as from heaven, Shaddai, the Almighty. The reading is contested, the letters are faint, and most viewers do not find them without being told; granted, they would make the covenant after the flood the picture’s frame. The loop of the river has been read as a question mark set in the land. The desk credits the letters a little and not much: without them the structure of two halves still stands, strong rather than deep, and The Archetypal Deep stands at 8.1.
The elevation is of two kinds held in one field. The storm is the dread kind, a dark mass of cloud with rain still falling and the wind in the broken tree; the valley is the serene kind, a great lit distance with a river curling through it, seen from a height that makes the size of the land felt. Their meeting along the diagonal, where the light breaks out, is the summit moment, and it is sustained across the whole width rather than placed at one point. The frequency is good: the eye goes back to the storm, the loop and the far hills. But the grandeur is that of a view from a known lookout, and the pastoral half is beautiful more than transporting. The Sublime stands at 8.3.
Movement V
In its own field, American painting of the 1830s, the picture is the clearest statement of what American landscape could claim: that a view of native ground could bear the moral weight of history painting, with wild and settled together as the national subject. The painters of the next generation who made the panoramic, morally charged view their ground, Asher Durand, Frederic Church, the painter’s pupil, and later Albert Bierstadt in the great exhibited views of the 1850s and 1860s, worked in the field it helped to define, and it is the standard image of that school’s beginnings. The reach is partly diffuse: the school is the painter’s whole work as much as this canvas, and outside America the canvas redirected little; Turner and Friedrich were not answering it. Pressure on Tradition stands at 8.2.
The questions have not closed in 190 years. The nineteenth century saw a celebration of the American scene, the twentieth the founding image of a national school, and the later twentieth a picture divided against itself: whether it celebrates the clearing or mourns it, whether the painter on the wild side is a partisan or a witness, whether the Hebrew is there at all. Recent decades have read it through the land’s prior inhabitants, who are not in the picture. Much of the return is to frames of reading, nation, ecology, expansion, more than to depths in the image, and The Bottomless Well stands at 8.2. The image itself is whole, exhibited in the year it was painted and reproduced in nearly every account of American art; its presence is chiefly American, and The Imperishable stands at 9.1, short of the widest. The orders it holds are the natural order, labour, the nation and its history, the sacred and art, integrated by one line; the people are absent but for the painter, and The Encompassed stands at 7.5.
Winslow Homer’s The Gulf Stream, at 8.2, is the nearest American neighbour. Homer leads on seven axes by a tenth or two, the necessity, the disclosure, the myth, the swerve, the form, the depth and the making; the two are level on three; The Oxbow leads on Pressure on Tradition, as the founding image of its school, and on The Encompassed, and the two stand level. Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, at 8.4, the nearer Romantic image of a figure before a view, leads on every axis but The Imperishable, where they are level, and The Encompassed, where The Oxbow is broader. Dvořák’s New World Symphony, at 8.2, a European’s image of the American land, is a near twin: higher on the sublime and the making, lower on disclosure, myth and form. Thoreau’s Walden, at 8.8, puts the same New England question of wild and cultivated land in full a decade later, and leads on every axis but The Imperishable, where they are level: what the canvas shows in one view, the book articulates.
Act III · The Twelve
Subtraction, part by part. The diagonal cannot go: it is the picture’s argument, wild above and to the left, settled below and to the right, and everything in the field is sorted by it. The storm cannot go: it is the time the title names, and without it the left half is only woods. The river’s loop cannot go: it is the hinge on which the halves turn, the one form in the valley neither wild nor made. The painter cannot go: without him the canvas is a view; with him it is a choice made from a place, and his look back puts us on the summit. The broken tree is the storm’s mark in the near ground. What yields is extent: the plain could lose a band, and some foreground foliage and rock is permitted rather than compelled.
Score: 8.1 / 10
What can be stated: a people’s relation to its land is a division it carries in itself. The one view holds the wilderness the people revere and the cultivation they are making of it, and the line between them moves only one way. The picture shows this as a present tense, not a choice already made: the storm is passing, the clearing is under way, the smoke is rising, and the painter sits on the side that is going. It holds wherever land is turned to use. Held below the bar: the meaning is carried as much by mood as by statement; its sharpest particular, the Hebrew read on the hill, needs a caption and is contested; and the judgment is left open, honestly, but at the viewer’s bringing.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Elevation of two kinds held in one field. The storm is the dread kind: a dark mass of cloud with rain still falling across the left, the wind in the broken tree. The valley is the serene kind: a great lit distance with a river curling through it, seen from a height that makes the viewer feel the size of the land. Their meeting along the diagonal, where the light breaks out from under the cloud, is the summit moment, and it runs the whole width of the canvas rather than standing at one point; the eye returns to the storm, the loop and the far hills. Held below the top: the grandeur is that of a view from a known lookout, not of the overwhelming, and the pastoral half is beautiful more than transporting.
Score: 8.3 / 10
More built than evoked, though not everywhere. The built structure is the old pattern of the garden and the wilderness, Eden and the world outside it, carried not by allusion but by the diagonal, which turns a fact of topography into a moral division. The storm passing is the Deluge passing. Cleared patches on the far hill have been read by some scholars as Hebrew letters, Noah, and, read inverted as from heaven, Shaddai, the Almighty; granted, they make the covenant after the flood the frame. They are faint and contested, and credited a little. Without them the myth is a strong structure of two halves rather than a deep one. The particular stays particular: a real lookout, a real river, a painter in the clothes of his day.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The inheritance is triple: the topographical view, the printed panorama from a known lookout, and the European ideal landscape in its two modes, Salvator Rosa’s wild and Claude’s ordered, which the picture sets side by side across one line. The departure is to make a topographical view carry an argument: two modes of landscape painting become two conditions of a nation’s land, and the painter enters his own view as the one who must choose. That is a real turn for American painting. The stake was modest. A view of a known lookout was a saleable kind, the painter’s risk in that decade lay in his allegorical cycles, and the devices, the dark tree at the edge, the storm, the lit distance, were the tradition’s.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Substitute another form and much of the knowledge goes. The picture knows what it knows because painting holds both halves at once: in a text the wild comes before the cultivated or after it, and the order is a verdict; on the canvas they are simultaneous, and the line between them is where the viewer stands. The panoramic width makes the valley a land rather than a place, and the high viewpoint makes the viewer an owner of the view before he knows it. The painter’s small figure, turned outward, makes the frame part of the argument. Held below the top: the core opposition could pass, with loss, into a print or a written account of the lookout, as the travel writing of the day did, and the panorama was a received form, not a found one.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Evidence over promise: 190 years, and a reception that keeps finding new questions. The nineteenth century read the canvas as a celebration of the American scene, the twentieth as the founding image of a national school of landscape, and the later twentieth as a picture divided against itself: whether it celebrates the clearing or mourns it, whether the painter on the wild side is a partisan or a witness, whether the Hebrew on the hill is there at all and what covenant it would name. Recent decades read it through the land’s prior inhabitants, who are not in it. The canvas yields detail on return, the threads of smoke, the rain in the far distance. Held below the top: much of the return is to frames of reading, nation, ecology, expansion, more than to depths in the image.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Force and reach are scored together, in the field of American painting of the 1830s. The intrinsic force: the picture is the clearest statement of what American landscape could claim, that a view of native ground could bear the moral weight of history painting, and it set wild and settled together as the national subject. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the painters of the next generation who made the panoramic, morally charged view their ground, Asher Durand, Frederic Church, the painter’s pupil, and later Albert Bierstadt, in the great exhibited views of the 1850s and 1860s, worked in the field this canvas helped to define, and it is the standard image of the school’s beginnings. The reach is partly diffuse: the school is the painter’s whole work as much as this canvas, and outside America it redirected little.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at 190 years, against the row for seventy years to two centuries. Form: whole. The image is the image the painter made, and nothing that carries the meaning is lost or replaced. Presence: exhibited in the year it was painted, held now by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and very wide in the United States, where it is reproduced in nearly every account of the nation’s art; less present outside it. Fame lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: lining, varnish and cleaning are the ordinary history of an oil of its age, and no damage touching the image is known. The upper end of the usual figure, short of the widest, for a presence that is chiefly American.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged as command of oil on canvas at exhibition scale. The making bears the load: the meeting of storm and light along the diagonal is a matter of tonal control, and the light breaking from under the cloud onto the plain is managed so that the sunlit half reads as distance and calm while the dark half stays close and heavy. The far valley is painted in fine, legible detail, fields and farms at the scale of a map, without losing the atmosphere that sets it back; the distant rain is laid with restraint. The costs: the foreground trees and rocks are worked in a formula of the period, the broken tree is a stock device, the painter’s figure is summary, and beside the best of Turner or Constable the handling is careful rather than inventive.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the storm on the wild crest at the upper left and the smoke rising from a clearing on the plain at the lower right. One law governs them: the land is ranked along a single line from the untouched to the used, and weather, light, vegetation and human sign are all sorted by it. The river obeys it by belonging to both halves; the painter obeys it by sitting on one side and looking across. Nothing in the picture contradicts the law, and the range it covers is wide for one view: weather, wild and cultivated, near and far, the maker and his ground. Held below the top: the law is a binary, and a binary once grasped is complete. The coherence is clear more than rich.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The orders held: the natural order, in storm, forest and river; labour, in the fields, the farms and the smoke of clearing; the nation and its history, in a land turning from one condition to another; the sacred, in the storm as deluge and, if they are granted, in the letters on the hill; and art, in the painter set into his own view. The diagonal integrates them; they are not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that the people are absent but for the painter: no family, no consciousness but his, no state except by implication, and no one who lived on this land before it was cleared. A landscape of large reach held at the scale of one view. The figure describes the form.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.1, then The Made and The Inner Law at 8.4, The Sublime and The Living Form at 8.3. An image whole after 190 years and reproduced in nearly every account of American art; a meeting of storm and light along one diagonal held in close tonal control, with the far valley legible at the scale of a map; one law ranking the whole land from the untouched to the used; two sublimes, dread and serene, in one field; and a form that holds the wild and the cultivated at once, with the painter set inside it.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.5: nature, labour, the nation, the sacred and art are held, and the people are absent but for the painter, with no family, no state but by implication, and no one who lived on the land before it was cleared. Above it, The Swerve at 7.7: a real turn for American painting made on a saleable kind with the tradition’s devices. Then The Inevitable, The Unconcealment and The Archetypal Deep at 8.1: a plain that could lose a band, a meaning carried as much by mood as by statement and left open, and a myth that is a strong structure of two halves, deep only if contested letters are granted.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.1 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.3, The Made at 8.4, The Inner Law at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.1 clears the bar of 8.5, but Pressure on Tradition at 8.2 falls short by three tenths, The Unconcealment and The Archetypal Deep at 8.1 by four each, and The Swerve at 7.7 by eight, one gate of five. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.7, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.5. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 98.4, an average of 8.20 that displays 8.2, in Tier IV; the summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate, and the aggregate, eight tenths short of 9.0, would withhold it besides.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the canvas: well as to its composition, its date, its setting and its reception; less closely as to its surface and condition, known from reproduction and report rather than close study, so that where a judgment turns on the state of the paint it is held more loosely. The work scored is the single canvas, exhibited as View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm and known as The Oxbow, oil, about 130.8 by 193 centimetres, painted 1836, now in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. No other version is scored. Lining, varnish and cleaning are the ordinary history of an oil of its age and bear on its survival only; no damage touching the image is known. The painter’s sketches and the earlier printed views from the same summit are context and are not scored. Nothing is quoted but the title. The Hebrew letters read on the far hillside are given as a contested reading and credited only a little. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the source and year of the canvas’s entry into the museum and whether it has hung there without a break, the exhibition at which it was first shown, the scholar who first published the letters, the particular printed view of the summit the painter may have used and its maker, and whether boats can be made out on the river.