Thomas Cole's Oxbow and the American Zion Divided

Abstract

Thomas Cole’s View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm (The Oxbow) (1836) benefited from the artist’s personal engagement with the architectural, panoptic imagery of Freemasonry. At the same time, in conceiving this panoramic landscape, Cole revived the American Puritan tradition of identifying New World sites with the biblical geography of the Holy Land, in this case the dualistic, wilderness/pastoral origins of Solomon’s Temple. The hitherto unexplored career of Charles N. Talbot, the pious, entrepreneurial patron of The Oxbow, illuminates how Cole’s painting spoke to an urban alliance of fraternal cultural institutions, moral reform societies and Christian missionary groups, keen to counteract populist discontent and the nation’s deep divisions over politics, socio‐economics, race and religion. Though it posed the prospect of a “New Jerusalem,” Cole’s spatially divided painting expressed a conflicted vision, split by millennial desire and dark fears of national strife.

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