Past Exhibitions

Changing Prospects: The View from
Mount Holyoke

3 September –8 December 2002

This exhibition brings together the majority of known depictions of Mt. Holyoke, a landmark that has served as a travel destination, a subject for writers and artists, and a cultural icon for almost two centuries. Approximately 100 paintings, prints, photographs, and memorabilia will be on view at the museum, just minutes from the mountain's summit.

One of the first artists to convey the dramatic prospect from the summit on canvas was Thomas Cole, whose View from Mt. Holyoke, Northampton Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm (1836), more commonly known as The Oxbow, is a centerpiece of the exhibition. Cole brilliantly captured the scene’s drama in contrasting the dark, rugged rocks and trees of the mountain, symbolizing the untamed wilds confronting the early pioneers, and the peaceful, fertile valley below where the land has been tilled and planted.

It is the combination of wilderness and cultivated landscape afforded by the view from the 940-foot summit that was noted by writers and that has captivated visitors over almost two centuries. Nineteenth-century literary travelers who wrote about visiting Mt. Holyoke included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and James Fenimore Cooper. Emily Dickinson, who first visited the summit in 1849, would write two poems about the mountain (in 1863 and 1871). Nearly a century later Sylvia Plath, while teaching at Smith College 1957-58, penned a poem to Mt. Holyoke, as well.

Visitors also came from abroad. Many were from England and included Mt. Holyoke in their tour of the former colonies, adding it to stopovers at Niagara Falls, Boston, Hartford and New York. One English writer and artist, Edward Thomas Coke, wrote that the vista from Mt. Washington, New England's highest peak, could not equal that of Mt. Holyoke, "where all was richness and life." An illustrated publication from 1921 (included in this exhibition) proclaimed Mt. Holyoke to have "the grandest cultivated scene in the world."

Numerous other paintings, drawings and photographs depict Mt. Holyoke from a variety of vantage points. Some date from the 1800s, including an engraving after a drawing by British artist and topographer William Henry Bartlett. The print was published in 1840 in the book American Scenery and distributed broadly. A number of paintings of the view from Mt. Holyoke, of which three are included in the exhibition, were created on the basis of Bartlett’s well-known print. Among contemporary artists represented in the exhibition, Alfred Leslie was among the first to revisit Mt. Holyoke. He painted the view in 1972 while teaching at Amherst College. In 1983, he visited the area again and produced a series of large black and white watercolors, one of which depicts the dark silhouette of the Holyoke Range piercing a light-streaked sky, as seen from Interstate 91. Introducing the modern industrial world emphatically into his picture, the highway is prominent in the middle of the composition, as are the rectangles of two highway signs. In contrast to Leslie’s realist vision is Stephen Hannock’s idealism. More than any other living artist, Stephen Hannock has made the view from Mt. Holyoke the central subject of his work, revealing in each canvas his overriding preoccupation with light. Having produced seven paintings of the subject, including one in the collection of the Smith College Museum of Art that will be included in the exhibition.

The curators of this unique exhibition are Martha Hoppin and Susan Danly. Both are widely published scholars of American art. Hoppin is an independent curator who has most recently organized exhibitions for the Fitchburg Art Museum and the New Britain Museum of American Art. Danly is a former curator of American Art at the Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, and recently was appointed curator of graphics, photographs, and contemporary art at the Portland Museum of Art. Each has contributed a substantial essay to the exhibition catalogue, published under the same title as the exhibition by Cornell University Press. The book examines the history of the mountain as a cultural icon and depictions of the view of and from the summit. A third essay, by Ethan Carr of the department of landscape architecture and regional planning at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, considers twentieth-century efforts to preserve the mountain. The reflective foreword is by Christopher Benfey, professor of English at Mount Holyoke College.

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