Thomas Coles The Oxbow
A Romantic study of America in the European landscape style The painting of "The Oxbow" is on its surface merely a landscapeportrayal of a meandering river that folds back upon itself in the shape ofa bow or oxtail. Today, the work hangs in The Metropolitan Museum of Artin the section of the museum devoted to American Romanticism. The Americanpainter Thomas Cole originally painted the work 1836. This was during theend of the Romantic period of art in Europe, but only the beginning of theflourishing of the Romantic Movement in American art. The painting'sstyle, perspective, and ideological themes makes use of European aspects ofthe landscape tradition and Romantic ideology, yet ultimately its renditionof these themes is quintessentially and uniquely American in the ways thatit portrays the themes of humanity versus nature and the wilderness versus In gazing upon the painting, the viewer notes that the painting issituated in its perspective in such a fashion, in traditional Romanticstyle, that the individual gazer's perspective has predominance over thenatural subject. The subject of the oxtail of the river is situated at a
" (Nash, 1969)Conquest of nature, as well as appreciation, was key to human survival andthe American experience. The title recallsthe titles of the carefully situated Romantic poems of the English WilliamWordsworth, whom often included specific, real locations and dates in hispoems, to create the sense that they were spontaneously created or at leastinspired by specific aspects of nature, during specific locations of timeand place in the poet's life. Thus, theact of gazing upon the river is given equal importance to the actualdepiction of nature itself. The naturally occurring phenomenon depicted by Cole, that of an oxbow,is so symmetrical it appears to the more carefully gazing eye of the vieweras a constructed watery body. William Cronon also "points out that the diagonal of the tree tothe left that directs the view of the scene down the valley toward thefarmland is a trademark of celebrated French landscapist Claude Lorrain. The Romantics believed thatnature was the inherent possessor of abstract qualities such as truth,beauty, independence and democracy. " (Adams, 1996) By being close tonature, in the traditional, European Romantic view, one better understoodone's self as an individual, existing outside of social constructs and thesocial milieu of civilization. The oxbow of Cole seems more carved out ofthe natural green by the hands of the human animal in its design andsymmetrical perfection. Thus, the Romantic stress upon nature, butspecifically humanity's perception and interpretation of nature thus is atthe forefront of the organization of the painting. The civilization "that replaces the wilderness is asbeautiful in its order as nature is in its sublimity," and its wildness. Cronin's writings also have stressed that Thomas Cole's "The Oxbow"relies heavily on certain aspects of European conventions of landscapepainting. " In Romantic renderings of art, but inAmerican Romanticism in particular, "Romanticism set up opposition to theNeo-classic insistence on order and hierarchy by championing individualfreedom through man's relationship to nature. The painting was created during the Industrial Revolution inAmerica, as it was beginning to affect the countryside. The full title of the poem, "The Oxbow (The Connecticut River nearNorthampton)," is also a kind of homage to European Romanticism and theEuropean Romantic tradition-but with an American accent. The painting'sorganization ultimately asks not what is nature, but what transpires whenhumanity gazes at and interacts with nature.
Common topics in this essay:
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Movement American,
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Native Americans,
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William Cronon,
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Acceptance Essays
