Sunset, View on the Catskill

1833

Oil on wood panel

Unframed: 16 1/2 x 24 1/2 in. (41.9 x 62.2 cm)
Framed: 25 3/8 × 33 1/4 × 3 7/8 in. (64.5 × 84.5 × 9.8 cm)

Gift of the New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts

1858.44

This is one of the first works that Cole created for his patron, New York merchant Luman Reed. The artist had just returned from a trip to Europe with the canvases of the great seventeenth-century landscape painter Claude Lorrain fresh in his mind. He had depicted this site - North Mountain seen from Catskill Creek - several times, and here he applied a classic Claudean formula to the scene, depicting a view across a reflective watery surface that takes the eye through clearly delineated foreground, middle, and distant space that is enclosed on one side a by dense vertical mass of foliage. An oil sketch (private collection) shows that Cole did not directly reproduce the scene before him, but he created a pastoral mood by positioning the trees to better "frame" the scene and reduced the size of the rowboat. He also added a wooden structure on the hill at right and an animal along the shore. Cole must have been pleased with the composition, since he used it again; he painted a replica of this work (Albany Institute of History and Art) that he later developed further into a more complex composition several years later entitled North Mountain and Catskill Creek, 1838 (Yale University Art Gallery). When Sunset, View on the Catskill was exhibited at the National Academy of Design in 1834, American Monthly Magazine gently chided Cole for a "certain mannerism," perhaps referring to the artist's use of compositional devices that departed from the exact topography of the landscape; such criticisms vexed Cole throughout his career. However, the New York Evening Post called it "gorgeous," and when James B. Smillie executed an engraving of the painting the following year it earned similar praise.

DescriptionA view in oval format of North Mountain as seen from Catskill Creek at sunset in the Catskill Mountains. View features a wooden structure on the hill at the right and an animal drinking at the water's edge, as well as a lone fisherman in a boat in the left foreground.

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