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August 30, 2002
Art
Museum's Inaugural Exhibition to Feature Thomas Cole's
1836 Painting The Oxbow
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Photograph ©1995 The Metropolitan Museum
of Art
Thomas
Cole's View from Mt. Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts,
after a Thunderstorm (The Oxbow), 1836, oil on canvas.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. Russell
Sage, 1908. The Oxbow is included in the Mount Holyoke
College Art Museum's exhibition Changing Prospects:
The View from Mount Holyoke, which examines the historical
significance of the College's namesake, Mount Holyoke.
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In 1836, Thomas Cole
(1825–1870), a leader of America's first school of landscape
painting, the Hudson River school, made sketches from the summit
of Mount Holyoke, the mountain after which the College is named.
The resulting painting, View from Mt. Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts,
after a Thunderstorm (The Oxbow), reveals a valley of cultivated
plains edged by forested wilderness, a scene that was in the artist's
day "the most famous landscape in America," writes Pulitzer
Prize-winning author Tracy Kidder. Cole's painting, on loan from
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, will be the centerpiece of Changing
Prospects: The View from Mount Holyoke, an exhibition on display
at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum September 3–December
8. An opening reception, at which Kidder will be the featured
guest, will take place Friday, September 27, at 5 pm at the museum.
The reception is part of a weekend celebration that will be held
September 27–29 to mark the reopening of the art building
and museum after the completion of a renovation and expansion
project that began in the spring of last year. Upcoming issues
of CSJ will feature details of celebration events.
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Mount Holyoke College archives and special
collections
Mountain Day seniors, 1912
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The first major exhibition
in the renovated museum, Changing Prospects will bring together
approximately one hundred objects to tell the story of Mount Holyoke
as a cultural icon, destination, and subject for writers and artists
over a period of two centuries. "Because Cole's Oxbow was
such a well-known painting," says museum director Marianne
Doezema, "many people think that it created the reputation
for the mountain. In fact, Cole came to Mount Holyoke because
it was a national monument. When Mary Lyon named her school after
the mountain, she was naming it after something very well known.
That's not so well appreciated today."
During the first quarter
of the nineteenth century, the idea of travel for the purpose
of enjoying natural scenery made its way to America from the Continent,
and increasing numbers of tourists began to wind their way to
the top of Mount Holyoke. "Just as in Europe, there were
guide books to the U.S. that provided information about taking
the ‘Grand Tour,' " says Doezema. "You would go
to Boston, New York, Niagara Falls, Mount Washington, and Mount
Holyoke." Next to Niagara Falls, Mount Holyoke was the most
popular tourist destination in the country. The 1867 edition of
Burt's Illustrated Guide of the Connecticut Valley, noting that
some 20,000 people visited the mountain in a single season, effused:
"[Mount Holyoke] is a favorite place of resort. The view
is beautiful and picturesque, and is pronounced by distinguished
travelers to be the finest in America."
While Mount Holyoke
stands at just under one thousand feet, "it was important,"
says Doezema, "because the prospect afforded from the summit
provided a combination of untouched wilderness, which in the nineteenth
century was seen as a manifestation of God's power, and cultivation,
which represented the progress of civilization —beautifully
combined in one view." Yet the prospect was appreciated well
before nineteenth-century Romanticists canonized it. The first
surviving recorded account from the summit is that of the Reverend
Paul Coffin. In 1760, the Maine preacher wrote, "The view
here far exceeds all I have ever had before," and rhapsodized
over the sight of "hundreds of acres of wheat, rye, peas,
flax, oats, corn, etc." To Coffin's eye, the view resembled
"a beautiful garden."
By 1821, the mountaintop
had its first shelter—a small cabin—put up through the
efforts of a group of citizens from Northampton. From the 1830s
and into the '40s the little cabin offered not only shelter but
also "refreshments of every kind." Newlyweds John and
Fanny French bought the thriving business in 1849, replacing the
cabin with a small hotel and constructing the first tramway in
New England, which would convey visitors from the carriage road
to the summit.
It was around this
time that Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts visited the
mountain. The statesman was impressed: "I have been all over
England, have traveled through the highlands of Scotland; I have
passed up and down the Rhine. I have ascended Mt. Blanc and stood
on Campagna in Rome; but have never seen anything so surprisingly
lovely as this." Sumner's is one of many nineteenth-century
paeans to Mount Holyoke, which attracted famous visitors from
both Europe and America. Literary visitors included Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dickens, Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow, and Henry James. At the height of its popularity in
the second half of the nineteenth century, Swedish opera star
Jenny Lind came and christened the region "the Paradise of
America."
Painters were drawn
to paradise, as well. Cole's Oxbow—the name refers to the
sharp bend in the river—is the most famous depiction, but
there are countless others. When Wall Street baron John Dwight
bought the summit hotel from the Frenches late in the nineteenth
century, he commissioned David John Gue to portray the mountain.
Gue's serene, pastoral View of Mount Holyoke (1890) is today part
of the art museum's permanent collection and is featured in the
exhibition.
Also part of the exhibition
is an assortment of paintings related by a curious feature. "One
of the vehicles for getting the image of Mount Holyoke distributed
nationally, and indeed internationally," says Doezema, "was
a little print by William Henry Bartlett. Many thousands of Bartlett's
prints were produced, and the print was published in a book called
American Scenery." So great was the demand for images of
Mount Holyoke that many artists painted it from the Bartlett print
without ever having visited the mountain. Several of these sight-unseen
renderings will be featured as well.
After the turn of
the century, the mountain's fame subsided. The hotel suffered
a decline with the advent of the automobile, which made many more
kinds of travel experiences possible. In 1916, local manufacturer
and philanthropist Joseph Skinner bought the Holyoke Range and
the hotel. He immediately logged all of the chestnut trees, which
were afflicted with disease, replacing them with 51,000 white
pines. Skinner improved the hotel and revived the summit railroad,
but no amount of sprucing up could recover the renown Mount Holyoke
had enjoyed during its heyday. In 1940, Skinner donated the Summit
House and 375 acres of land to the state of Massachusetts, creating
Joseph Allen Skinner State Park.
After years of neglect,
the Summit House was extensively renovated in 1988. Today artists
are again among the many thousands who visit each year. Reflecting
this, contemporary views of Mount Holyoke will also be among the
highlights of the exhibition. Stephen Hannock's The Oxbow,
After Church, After Cole, Flooded, 1979–94 (Flooded River
for the Matriarchs, E. and M. Mongan) and Alfred Leslie's
Holyoke Range, Near Oxbow, Easthampton, Massachusetts will
hang in proximity to Cole's masterpiece. An array of prints, photographs,
memorabilia, and other historical material will flesh out the
tale of one of the nineteenth century's greatest cultural icons.
Accompanying the exhibition
Changing Prospects: The View from Mount Holyoke will be
a book of the same name with essays by Ethan Carr, Susan Danly,
and Martha Hoppin, and a foreword by Mount Holyoke English professor
Christopher Benfey.
The
counter is
15,275
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