THOMAS COLE’S THE CLOVE, CATSKILLS: A NATIVE “PAST” FOR

A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE

By

Michael Quituisaca

Submitted to the

Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences

of American University

in Partial Fulfillment of

the Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Arts

In

Art History

Chair:

Nika Elder, Ph.D.

Ying-Chen Peng, Ph.D.

Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences

May 4, 2020 Date

2020

American University

Washington, D.C. 20017

© COPYRIGHT

by

Michael Quituisaca

2020

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

For David

THOMAS COLE’S THE CLOVE, CATSKILLS: A NATIVE “PAST” FOR A SUSTAINABLE

FUTURE

BY

Michael Quituisaca

ABSTRACT

From the beginning of his career, Thomas Cole was known for his unique vision and appreciation of the American wilderness. His early paintings of the Catskill Mountains in upstate

New York gained critical praise for their embrace of the wild elements of nature and rejection of the industrialization that came to define the region in the early 19th century. The Clove, Catskills exhibits these characteristics. In this work, Cole depicted the Kaaterskill Clove – a popular gorge and tourist destination – as a remote and wild site, absent of any markers of tourism or the tanning factories that were rampantly spreading through the mountains at the time. Because Cole depicts the Clove as uncultivated and wild, scholars have read this work as emblematic of his anti-industrial sentiments. The discovery of the pentimento of a Native American figure in the composition – made visible after a cleaning in 1964 – has served to reinforce this narrative; for example, scholars have interpreted this figure as a ghostly reminder of the region before industrialization and white settlement. This thesis, by contrast, interprets this work in light of

Cole’s interest in Native American history. By drawing on the artist’s own letters and the native history of the region, I argue that the painting represents Kaaterskill Clove as a self-sufficient ecosystem, as the Mohican and Esopus would have seen it. In his attempt to envision a sustainable future for the region, Cole inadvertently adopted, even appropriated, a Native

American perspective on nature. The painting thus offers a vision of the future for the Catskill region—one where resources are sourced in a sustainable manner, in line with Native American philosophy. i

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This thesis is indebted to my time as a Cole Fellow at the Thomas Cole National Historic

Site and getting the opportunity to work support on the exhibition Picturesque and Sublime:

Thomas Cole’s Transatlantic Inheritance in 2018. The Clove, Catskills was one of a select group of Cole paintings chosen for the exhibition and was subsequently my first experience with it.

Appropriately, it was in the gallery of Thomas Cole’s reconstructed studio in the Catskills where the ideas expressed in this thesis began growing. The staff at the Thomas Cole National Historic

Site were paramount during this project’s beginnings. I thank Director Betsy Jacks and curator

Kate Menconeri for allowing me access to the Ellwood Parry Archive at the site, as well as their for mentorship. Also, I am thankful for 2018-2019 Cole Fellow Peter Fedoryk’s work towards transcribing Thomas Cole’s journals and providing me with the journal entries that proved essential to this thesis. Jonathan Palmer at the Vedder Library in Coxsackie, New York also helped with my primary research, and I am grateful for his guidance and friendship. Keith

Gervase at The New Britain Museum of American Art also deserves thanks for giving me access to The Clove, Catskills’ object file and answering questions that arose from it.

I owe the completion of this thesis to the continued support and guidance from the professors of Art History at American University throughout this process. I am especially grateful to Dr. Nika Elder for providing her expertise and encouragement, especially during the last leg of this project when the COVID-19 pandemic threatened this project’s completion. Her fortitude, as well as that of the entire department staff, provided a guiding light through uncertain times. It has been an honor to work under this dedicated team.

Lastly, words cannot express the gratitude I have for the friends that I have made during my time at AU. Their encouragement meant more than they will ever know, and I credit them for

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helping through some of the most difficult challenges that emerged during this process. I am thankful for Taylor Curry, Sarah Froonjian, Shereka Mosley, Claire Sandberg, and Abby

Swaringam for their friendship, and a special thanks to David Quituisaca and Cynthia Hodge-

Thorne for being the greatest support system that any aspiring scholar could ever ask for.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ...... i

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ...... v

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

CHAPTER 1 THE CLOVE, CATSKILLS, AND A NATIVE AMERICAN PERSPECTIVE ON NATURE ...... 7

CHAPTER 2 THE CLOVE, CATSKILLS AS A VISION OF THE FUTURE ...... 22

CONCLUSION ...... 36

ILLUSTRATIONS...... 38

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 39

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1. John Rubens Smith, Catskill Mountain House, 1830. Aquatint with hand-color on paper...... 38

Figure 2. Thomas Cole, The Clove, Catskills, 1827. Oil on canvas...... 38

Figure 3. Guy Johnson’s Map of the Six Nations, 1771...... 38

Figure 4. Detail of The Clove, Catskills. The colored outline of a Native American figure...... 38

Figure 5. Thomas Cole, Kaaterskill Falls, 1826. Oil on canvas. Wadsworth Atheneum...... 38

Figure 6. Thomas Cole, The Falls of Kaaterskill, 1826. Oil on canvas...... 38

Figure 7. Thomas Cole, Stony Gap, Kaaterskill Clove, 1826-27. Oil on canvas...... 38

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INTRODUCTION

By 1827, Thomas Cole (1801-1848) had already established his reputation as a young phenom. The landscape paintings he presented in the inaugural show of the National Academy of

Design in New York City the year prior were lauded for their unique embrace of the American wilderness. Where other painters had pictured the Northeast in a pastoral and domesticated way,

Cole presented it as teeming with life, paying special attention to the components of nature: the various species of trees and foliage, cloud formations, mountains and weather in the region.1 The

Clove, Catskills (1827) is one such painting. Cole’s imagined depiction of the Kaaterskill

Clove—a popular nickname given to the gorge between High Peak, Roundtop, and South

Mountain in the Catskills of New York—is absent of any trace of the development and industry that carved through the region in the early-19th century. The Clove, Catskills presents the popular gorge as remote, bountiful, and wild. The viewing platforms and trail markers that made this site accessible to 19th century tourists are substituted with jagged rocks and branches, a precipitous drop, and a passing thunderstorm. However, the discovery of the pentimento of a Native

American figure in the composition–made visible from a cleaning in 1964-signals Cole’s awareness that despite these lands being wild, they were not uninhabited.

The discovery of this pentimento invites an examination of Cole and his understanding of the Native American history of this region. While this painting was one of Cole’s earliest depictions of the Kaaterskill Clove—a subject to which he returned repeatedly—his erasure of a

Native American figure from the composition came at a time when indigenous people were on

Cole’s mind, appearing in his Last of the Mohican series of the same year and in paintings one

1 Kornhauser, Elizabeth M. “Manifesto for an American Sublime: Thomas Cole’s The Oxbow” in Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings. Exh. cat. (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018): 83.

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year prior. Indeed, Cole’s journal entries reveal his research into uncovering the native names of the Catskills and his success in finding that of the Kaaterskill Falls. This information was not easily attainable, being buried under centuries of complex land deeds between the Mohican and

Esopus tribes of the Catskills and early Dutch settlers. That he eventually found the native name of Kaaterskill Falls speaks to an incredible amount of research on Cole’s part.

This desire to learn about the region’s history came from a love for the mountains that awoke in him from his first visit as a young man, right before he emerged onto the New York

City art scene. Cole’s ability to push past the boundaries of conventional picturesque landscape depiction was the product of his informal development as a painter. Born in 1801 in Bolton-le-

Moors, England, Cole’s only training in the arts would be as an engraver’s assistant. It was in this trade that he would find work when his father moved the family to Ohio in 1818, where Cole worked in wood engraving as a teenager. Eventually making his way to New York, learning about painting from books, Cole’s keen sense for landscape would not fully develop until 1825, when a benefactor would send him to the Catskills for inspiration. The paintings he returned with were emblematic of an artist untrained in conventional American landscape methods, emphasizing his own vision of the wilderness over faithful depiction. These paintings set the precedent that Cole’s nature paintings would generally follow, prioritizing robust flora and fauna over trailheads and cleared fields. Special attention was given to weather and its effects on atmosphere rather than capturing the land on a picturesque, sunny day. Viewing platforms and fences were replaced with dangerous rocky outcrops over precipitous drops. It was an embrace of wilderness that only an artist who trained outside of the norm could capture.

The Clove, Catskills serves as one of the best examples of this embrace. This perspective on wilderness would become synonymous with Cole himself and endear him to the

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elite circles of the New York City art world. In fact, this perspective would fully develop into the proto-environmentalist sentiments found in his Essay on American Scenery of 1836. However, to claim that Cole was one of the first Americans to perceive the wilderness as something to revere and protect would be an injustice to the original Americans that had thought of the environment in this manner for generations. On his own accord, without first-hand knowledge on the subject,

Cole’s sentiments on wilderness touched upon the Native American way of life. Albeit unintentional, Cole unwittingly appropriated a Native perspective on wilderness to further his own environmental interests.

As such, this thesis argues that Cole’s depiction of Kaaterskill Clove as “wild” is in line with Native American thinking that understands nature as a reinforcing eco-system. The Clove,

Catskills’ special attention to the natural weather systems at play signals Cole’s awareness of nature’s ability to replenish itself. However, this painting unwittingly embodies other tenets of

Native philosophy on nature. Both Cole and Native American philosophy agree that nature can provide for humanity’s needs if cultivated in a sustainable manner, rather than the reaping of resources that was the norm for industrialists of the era. The absence of any human presence in the painting, whether Native American or white, illustrates the shared belief that human effect on nature should be minimal and untraceable. Because white European culture had done a significant amount of deforestation to the region by the early 19th century, Cole comes out as one of the earliest originators of a Western proto-environmentalist philosophy. But what remains to be seen, and what will be addressed in this thesis, is that Cole’s painting offers a vision of the future for the Catskills should such sentiments be heeded. Because the Native American had been regulated to the realm of mythic past, such a figure in Cole’s painting would have set it in

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this realm. By eliminating the figure from the final composition, Cole was able to avoid setting this scene in the past and provide a glimpse of a sustainable future.

Scholarship around The Clove, Catskills tends to fall into camps that have come to define

Cole scholarship at large. Several scholars read Cole’s embrace of the wilderness in works like

The Clove, Catskills, through the lens of nostalgia and history. Art historians Tim Barringer and

Jennifer Raab have read the artist’s elimination of signs of industry (factories, trail markers, viewing platforms, among others) in this painting as emblematic of Cole’s anti-industrialist sentiments. They interpret the pentimento of the Native figure as a ghostly reminder of the region before settlement and expansion. Alan Wallach, one of the preeminent scholars on Cole, marks this painting as the moment in which the young Cole began to come into his own as an artist. He interprets similar omissions in Cole’s oeuvre as historicizing the American landscape, providing a past for the young nation. By his count, Cole’s native figures are devices that expound upon on this past. Building upon this earlier work, this thesis aims to illuminate the contemporary world that Cole was operating in and of which Native Americans remained a part—in both reality, but, more importantly for Cole, in popular culture. In the early 19th century, popular literature and art attend to Native culture only to frame it as “past” and on the road to extinction. The romanticizing of its demise, which served Western expansion, not only skewed Cole’s personal perception of Native peoples, but that of the whole country.

That said, two dissertations have fleshed out the role that Native Americans and their portrayal in popular media played in Cole’s work. Vernon Scott Dimond’s 1998 dissertation argues that Cole depicted Native Americans as stereotypical “noble savages” in his early paintings to appeal and respond to the patrons who commissioned his work. Dimond asserts that these patrons, the New York City elite, selectively commissioned and encouraged this stereotype

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in paintings, poetry, and literature to assert America’s cultural sophistication against British critics.2 Nancy Palm’s 2010 dissertation centers around Cole’s participation in the National

Academy of Design’s annual exhibitions. Specifically, she examines how the institution’s promulgation of racist and stereotypical depictions of Native Americans furthered the myth of native decline. She states that such depictions were complicit in promoting racial stereotypes that naturalized the displacement of Native Americans in the 19th century.3 Both of these dissertations seek to explain how and why Cole took up Native subjects and largely answer this question in terms of cultural pressures and tastes. What remains to be explored is Cole’s personal interest in Native subjects.

Building on the foundation created by these dissertations, this thesis continues to interrogate Cole’s pictorial interest in Native Americans. At a time when colonization and

Western expansion had actively buried Native American history, Cole went searching for it. His interest in the history of the Native people of the Catskills must not be overlooked. However, this is not meant to paint Cole as a savior of this Native history, nor does it mean to exonerate

Cole’s paintings of any wrongdoing to indigenous people. His depictions of Native Americans correspond with assumptions present in 19th-century popular literature and visual culture that assumed their extinction. But his thinking about nature happens to align with Native environmental philosophies and provides a new perspective on his depiction of the wilderness.

Analyzing the artist’s writings, including the aforementioned journal entries and his famed Essay on American Scenery, chapter one takes The Clove, Catskills at its word and

2 Dimond, Vernon S. “Eloquent Representatives: A study of the Native American figure in the early landscape of Thomas Cole, 1825-1830” (PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1998).

3 Palm, Nancy. “Thomas Cole’s Indian Subjects: Racial Politics and the National Landscape,” (PhD dissertation, Indiana University, 2011).

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analyzes the work as an uninhabited landscape painting. Cole’s depiction of this popular site as a remote and uncultivated wilderness, in the middle of a transitional season, being both nourished and ravished by a storm, exhibits an understanding of the region’s ecosystem and a need to preserve it. Such a desire aligns with the Native American perspective on land and nature. While

Cole was not, in any way, sympathizing with the Native Americans in the region, his interest in environmentalism prompted him to deploy and indeed exploit this point of view. These sentiments would put him decades ahead of white proto-environmentalist and naturalist philosophers such as Henry David Thoreau and John James Audubon.

Chapter two centers on the pentimento of the Native American and explores why the figure may not have served Cole’s goals. Because Cole adhered to the trope of “the noble savage” when picturing Native Americans, paintings that include them are located in the “past”.

By analyzing fully realized Native American figures in paintings Cole made around the time of

The Clove, Catskills, this chapter argues that the figure he erased from that painting would have impeded the work’s message about the region’s sustainability and his hopes for its future. The

Clove presents the Kaaterskill Clove not as it once was, but as what it could be if Cole’s intended audience of elite industrialists would aim to preserve the wilderness rather than profit off it. As such, the painting offers an alternate future for the Catskill region, one in which natural resources are maintained in a sustainable manner.

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CHAPTER 1

THE CLOVE, CATSKILLS, AND A NATIVE AMERICAN PERSPECTIVE

ON NATURE

By the late 1820s, the Kaaterskill Clove had become a wellspring for capitalist ventures.

The seemingly endless supply of hemlock trees that covered the region made the Clove a fitting base of operations for an international leather trade. Two major tanneries—one situated at the foothill of the gorge and another at its top—received uncured animal hides from as far as

California and South America. These hides were cured using tannin from the local hemlocks, then were shipped to New York City or Boston for finishing. The success of the Clove tanneries would spur others to open throughout the mountains, making the tanning industry one of the most significant –and profitable– industries in the Catskills. Equally as profitable was the budding tourism industry, which benefited from newly established tannery roads that made the

Clove and mountaintops accessible. Indeed, the whole region had been made recently accessible to an entirely new demographic of city-dwellers with the opening of a reliable steamboat transit system connecting New York City to the village of Catskill. 4 A print from 1830 by John Rubens

Smith, based on an earlier print from 1826 by Felix Duponchel, illustrates the ease in reaching the Catskills summits.5 Tourists, marked by their fine clothing with no signs of dirt or struggle, gather around the edge of an escarpment to look down into the mouth of the Clove while a horse drawn carriage, loaded with more tourists, easily whisks by towards the summit (Figure 1).

. Popular literature, such as Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle (1820) and James

Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers (1823), had not only instilled an appreciation for Catskill

4 Myers, Kenneth. “The Catskills and the Creation of Landscape Taste in America” in The Catskills: Painters, Writers, and Tourists in the Mountains 1820-1895. Exh. cat. (Yonkers: Hudson River Museum, 1987):30.

5 Ibid., 53.

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Mountain scenery in the American populace, but fueled a mythology for the entire region.6

Irving described the mountains as having “magical hues” whose summits “glow and light up like a crown of glory.” Natty Bumpo, the protagonist of Cooper’s tale, famously stated that “all creation” could be seen from the summit of South Mountain, implying that one could–quite literally–become closer to God. Capitalizing on the popularity of these narratives, a high-end hotel was created along the mountainside that boasted views worthy of its expense. The Catskill

Mountain House, opened in 1824 and situated on the very spot that Natty Bumpo described, would become the main attraction of the Catskills for the cultural elite.7 During its lifetime, prominent authors, artists, and merchants would visit and stay in the hotel, as would three

American Presidents. By the late 1820s, the region would be included in what came to be known as the Grand American tour – a series of leisure destinations that included the White Mountains in New Hampshire and Niagara Falls.8 As such, walking trails were created to lead tourists to the great features of the Catskills, such as the Kaaterskill Clove or Kaaterskill Falls, where viewing platforms would ensure their safety and enjoyment.

The development of American landscape painting in the early 19th century went hand in hand with the rise of landscape tourism. As more scenic areas opened to tourists, so did the possibilities for landscape subjects. As art historian Alan Wallach has pointed out, the early works that launched the career of Thomas Cole were scenes in the immediate vicinity of the

6 Newcombe, Emma. “Writing Whiteness: Antebellum Guidebooks and the Codification of the Landscape in Catskill Tourism and Print” in Early American Literature, vol. 54, no. 1, (2019): 190.

7 Roland Van Zandt. “The First Two Decades” from The Catskill Mountain House edited by Roland Van Zandt. (Hensonville: Black Dome Press: 1966): 42

8 Newcombe, “Writing Whiteness,” 190.

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Catskill Mountain House.9 The effects of industry and tourism had made a physical mark on the landscape, but, as Wallach and others note, Cole’s work demonstrates a conscious decision to omit any traces of them. His painting from 1827, The Clove, Catskills (Figure 2) is emblematic of this artistic license. The canvas depicts the Clove at the peak of the autumnal season; an abundance of vibrant red, yellow and orange foliage contrasts against the dark colors of trees caught in the shadow of a passing storm. The viewer is positioned at the edge of a rocky outcrop which provides a view that spans past the Catskill peaks into a clearing that fades into the horizon. Absent is the village of Palenville, named after one of the Clove tanneries operated by

Johnathan Palen, which was located at the foot of the Clove. Also absent is any sign of the tannery roads that cut through the mountains.10 Cole pictures the Clove as antithetical to the way entrepreneurs would favor it – not dotted by factories, tanneries, and industry, but remote, unsurmountable, and wild.

The decision to depict nature as uncultivated was counter to the way early 19th century

American audiences had learned to appreciate nature. Art historian Kenneth Myers argues that centuries of Dutch and English colonization and agrarian thought had conditioned audiences to associate wilderness with both danger and spiritual temptation. Of pre-revolution agrarian society he states: that Protestant philosophy throughout North America adapted the biblical imagery of the wilderness to the local North American environment and warned that the forest and mountain wilderness were places of spiritual as well as physical danger.11 He asserts that cleared fields and boundaries marked by fences were not only markers of safety, but also of ownership and successful

9 Wallach, Alan. “Thomas Cole: Landscape and The Course of Empire,” in Thomas Cole: Landscape into History, edited by William H. Truettner and Alan Wallach, exh. cat. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994): 51.

10 Myers, “The Catskills,” 31.

11 Ibid., 19.

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land cultivation. “The fence is a symbolic boundary marking the historical as well as the physical limit of the wilderness. Physically, the wilderness ends at the fence. Historically, the wilderness ended when it was brought under cultivation by the man who built the fence.”12 As such, a successful Dutch farm in the Catskills was judged by how much of its surrounding wilderness it was able to take in and tame. Further, Vernon Scott Dimond states that anxieties towards the wilderness spilled into Cole’s era and fueled British criticism of American life, labeling the

American wilderness as a site for “anarchy and dissolution.”13 However, that Cole chose to omit any markers of boundaries, cultivation, and industry speaks to not only a rejection of this conditioned philosophy––the fear of wilderness––but towards an alternative perspective. His thinking about the environment and the negative effects of industrialization fall in line with beliefs espoused by Native Americans since the advent of white settlement. In fact, Cole happened to be interested in the history of the people who once lived in these mountains: the neighboring tribes of the Esopus and the Mohicans.

“Quatawickknaak” and the Importance of Place-names in the Catskills

Two entries from Cole’s journals reveal an interest in this subject. On October 9, 1838,

Thomas Cole wrote in his journal, which he titled Thoughts and Occurrences, the following: "It is to be regretted that a better name has not been given to the Catskills [—] that the Indian one has not been preserved.”14 Such an entry reveals an awareness of the Native American history of

12 Ibid., 25.

13 Dimond, Vernon S. “Eloquent Representatives: A study of the Native American figure in the early landscape of Thomas Cole, 1825-1830” (PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1998), 91.

14 New York State Library, Manuscripts and special collections, Thomas Cole Papers, 1821-1863. SC10635 Box 4a. F1, Journal -Thoughts and occurrences – November 1834 – 1838.

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the region and its erasure. Just under a year later, on June 20, 1839, Cole would see his desire partially fulfilled:

“I have at length discovered what I have long desired the Indian name of the High Falls of the Kaaterskill – It is mentioned in an old deed…dated 1767. Which deed alludes to other deeds of older date 1702, 1686 wherein it is probable other particulars may be found [:] the names of the Catskill and Kaaterskill and of the mountains. The name of the Falls Quatawickknaak. I wish it had been a little more euphonious. I think the A’s in the word are sounded like we have it in Water. It is the Dutch pronunciation of the Indian word.”15

While these entries were written almost 12 years after the completion of The Clove, Catskills, they reveal a “long desire” to discover the native names of not just the Kaaterskill Falls, but the entire mountain range. For Cole to invest time into uncovering the native name of the Catskills, and for him to lament the loss of the name, runs counter to the social consciousness surrounding indigenous people in the 19th century. His research came at a time when Native Americans were considered the remnants of an era long gone. Historian Brian Dippie states that by 1812, the white American populace accepted the “utter extinction” of the Native American as a fact.

Indeed, Cole’s perception of Native Americans, and America’s perception of them at large, was shaped by contemporary romantic literature, poetry, and art that placed Native peoples strictly in the past and promulgated the myth of their demise and inevitable extinction.16 Cole’s fascination with Native Americans in his work can be attributed to these factors. But by invoking the name

“Quatawickknaak,” the native place-name of the Kaaterskill Falls, Cole had momentarily revived a name that had largely been erased by Dutch colonization. He had also touched upon one of the most significant tenets of Native American philosophy.

15 New York State Library, Manuscripts and Special Collections, Thomas Cole Papers, 1821-1863, collection code: SC10635, Box 4, Folder 7.

16 Dippie, Brian. “Their Power has been Broken: The Indian After the War of 1812” in The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy, edited by Brian Dippie, (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1982): 11.

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Of all the tenets of Native philosophy, one of the most significant to indigenous identity and history is place-names. Anthropologist Keith Basso argues that place-names are heavy with cultural and spiritual history that is key to the survival of tribes; they quite literally embody an eye-witness voice, linking present-day peoples to their ancestors, who named the region in the first place and marked the land as a site of Native spirituality.17 On the importance of naming,

Joy Porter, professor of Indigenous History at the University of Hull, argues that giving a place a

“new” name developed by European or American colonizers of the land erased the Native

American name that anchored the sense of identity and community in Native tribes. In a society that relied on oral tradition, place-names preserved a tribe’s history. To erase the name was to erase the Native American identity of the land.18

Cole’s search for the Native names of the region meant searching for a past buried under centuries of these “re-christenings.” By the 1820s, the Catskills had been erased of most of its native names, if not all of them. In fact, the names “The Clove” and “Catskills” have Dutch origins (which must have been a disappointment to Cole). The word “Clove” has its roots in the

Dutch word “Klove,” meaning a rocky cliff, a fissure, a gap, or a ravine. While in Dutch the word is an appellative, in English it describes real clefts.19 In regard to “Catskills,” historian

Shirley Dunn has discovered that the name is a combination of both Dutch and Mohican words.

The phrase “Cats Kil,” first appears on a map from the early 1600’s and combines the Dutch and

Mohican language. The name “Cat” may have been a Dutch nickname for a well-known leader

17 Basso, Keith. “Speaking with Names,” in Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache, edited by Keith Basso. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995): 77.

18 Porter, Joy. “Approaches to Spirituality, Tradition, Land, Wilderness, Nature, Landscape, and Place,” in Land and Spirit in Native America, edited by Joy Porter. (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2012): 15.

19 Myers, “The Catskills,” 29.

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or chief sachem of the Mohicans. His village was on a creek, which thus became, in Dutch, Cats

Kil, or Cat’s Creek. She asserts that the transfer of the name to the mountains came later.20

Indeed, Native place-names in the Catskills had been erased not only by Dutch “re-christenings,” but also by decades of land transactions with English and subsequent American negotiators.

Cole’s entry about discovering the Kaaterskill Falls’s native name via land deeds is indicative of this history. That he was only able to find the name of the Falls and that further research required digging into more deeds–each older than the next–speaks to just how buried these Native names were.21 His journal entry suggests that he was well on his way towards learning the native names for the rest of the region, which were just one or two more land deeds away. However, with decades of complex deeds stacked against him, Cole would only ever know the Clove by its

Dutch name. But while his research was not in service of native justice and most likely a search for new titles for his work, it nonetheless signals Cole’s awareness of the Catskills as a place of

Native American history in its own right, rather than as a prologue for American history. Dippie states that 19th century Americans not only thought of Native American’s extinction as fact, but

20 Dunn, Shirley. “Prologue,” in The River Indians: Mohicans Making History, edited by Shirley Dunn. (Fleishmanns: Purple Mountain Press, 2009): 7.

21 Indeed, land transactions between the Natives and Europeans in the Catskill region stretch as far back as the 1600s, with one of the earliest recorded transactions dating from 1630. This deed was between the Mohicans and Kilian Van Rensselaer, a wealthy Dutch patroon, or a sanctioned landholder on behalf of the Dutch West India Company. The deed would cover land immediately north of the Catskill Mountains and extend towards present-day Albany, covering about 40 miles. Such deeds were categorized not only by the large tracts of land they engulfed, but also of how they favored settler interests over a fair deal with Natives. In fact, the Dutch West India company would actively trade land for objects of lesser value, such as rusty rapiers. The 1708 Hardenbergh patent between the Esopus and Johannes Hardenbergh would be known for its vaguely defined boundaries, but it would see the end of the Esopus sovereignty of the Catskill Mountains. The patent would cover the entire Catskill mountain region, as well as land immediately to the south towards the Delaware River. This land would be further cut up a sold among settlers over the years, leading eventually into the hands of 19th century capitalists. Essentially, by the early 1700s, the Native American presence in the Catskills had been erased. This is most apparent in a 1771 map of the Six Nations by Guy Johnson, created for the Royal Governor of New York (Figure 3). The area labeled “Katskill Mountains” sees no markers of any Native presence, as indicated on the maps legend by a triangle. A dashed line cuts diagonally through, indicating a 1768 established boundary agreed upon by Mohawk, Oneida and white settlers, which gave the rights of ownership of the land west of the Catskills to settlers.

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that their extinction was a necessary part of the American story as it signaled white settlers as the rightful inheritors of the land.22 As such, Cole’s wish that the Native name “had been preserved” runs counter to the way Americans thought about Native American history.

A Native American Perspective

The significance of Cole’s search for the Native name of the Catskill mountains must not be overlooked. In an era of exponential expansion that threatened the erasure of indigenous history, Cole’s efforts towards uncovering said history allows for The Clove, Catskills, as well as

Cole’s entire Catskill oeuvre, to be examined in light of Native American beliefs. Recent scholarship has attempted to recover Cole’s relationship to British and European artistic traditions, but his work evolved in direct and unconscious conversation with native culture.

Indeed, through a Euro-American lens, warped by industrialization and tourism, The Clove,

Catskills reads as wild and remote. Without the markers of ownership–fences, roads, viewing platforms–this large tract of land seems ripe for unimpeded and unchallenged cultivation.

However, when seen through the tenets of native thought on land, The Clove, Catskills represents the Clove the way Native Americans of Cole’s time and their ancestors would have seen it.

Porter argues that cultivation of natural resources stems from centuries of western agrarian thought touting wilderness as the enemy of mankind, tracing back to the biblical origin of mankind being expelled from the Garden of Eden. Simply put, Christian beginnings tout the wilderness as a place of punishment for original sin, being the opposite of the cultivated safety of

Eden. Such teachings ultimately influenced humankind’s relationship with nature and the wild.

She credits Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, and other philosophers of the scientific revolution

22 Dippie, Brian. “The Anatomy of the Vanishing American” in The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy, edited by Brian Dippie, (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1982): 24

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towards producing “work that was used to advance a project of fundamental and profound vexation of the earth” in order to recover a lost Eden.23 This “vexation” played out in the

Christian man’s utilitarian relationship with the land, cultivating wilderness as a means of conquering it. Indeed, as Myers has pointed out, the Dutch and European definitions of a successful farm was indicative of these ideals.

This is counter to the way Native Americans perceived ownership and landscape. Porter asserts that Native Americans viewed the land as humanity’s collective responsibility and that what was deemed “wilderness” by European settlers was actually the product of centuries of careful management by Native Americans. She states:

“Euro-Americans… clung to the idea that Indians simply did not use the land…Therefore, when [they] encountered large tracts of [land] under intensive management for hunting and agriculture, it appeared to them to be not used at all. Since it was not fenced and it was not being used to farm domestic animals, it was only too easy for settler communities to believe the very thing that was most convenient for them to believe – that here was “empty” land, gifted to them by God, a veritable Eden rediscovered in a “New World””24

Native philosophies held that natural features such as trees, waterfalls, and the like are natural resources to be cultivated in a sustainable way. Rather than reaping and altering the land via agricultural methods, “intensive management” was a conscious attempt to untraceably preserve the land as it is. Cole’s embrace of the wilderness and his refusal to see it as an obstacle to man’s existence reveals a serendipitous alignment with Native American philosophy. Porter reveals that in indigenous thinking there is no sense of the “wild.” Rather than differentiating between wilderness and its opposite, there is simply a sense of “home” that is tied to the land. She quotes

23 Porter, Joy. “Approaches to Spirituality, Tradition, Land, Wilderness, Nature, Landscape, and Place,” in Land and Spirit in Native America, edited by Joy Porter. (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2012): 9.

24 Ibid., 11-12.

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the 19th century Native American activist Standing Bear, who states: “We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, and winding streams with tangled growth, as wild.

Only to the white man was nature a wilderness and only to him was the land infested with “wild” animals and “savage” people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful…”25 In both Cole and

Standing Bear’s interpretations of “wilderness,” there is a shared appreciation for the natural world not only as it already existed, but as a long-term resource. There is a respect for the eco- systems already at work.

The Clove, Catskills is indicative of Cole’s respect for these eco-systems. The omission of the tanneries that would have been present is a clear statement against humankind’s overstepping of these natural systems via immense deforestation. Consider that Cole, having the artistic license to depict the region in whatever season and weather he wanted, consciously chose the prime of autumn, after a storm. He depicts the Clove during a transitional season, introducing death as a crucial element in its life cycle. The deep red of the foliage not only signals leaves on their last breath, but also calls attention to the rocky outcrop from which a small stream of water precipitates. It is this stream that reveals the storm as having made its way through, leaving damaging, but necessary, marks on the landscape. The bare tree branches to the right of the composition, stripped of their leaves and writhing in agony, are in stark contrast to the foliage being nourished by pools of water to the left. This suggests that the bare branches were victims of a harsh lightning strike. As such, Cole represents the storm as simultaneously delivering death and nourishing the foliage. Likewise, he presents the autumnal season as the beginning of a process of regeneration, in which the trees and foliage undergo a natural process of sustainability and illustrates this region’s ability to replenish itself. This is an eco-system that is self-sustaining.

25 Porter, “On Middle Way Thinking,” 30.

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White western audiences may have seen this view as threatening, but, according to Native

Americans and Cole, it was the supreme expression of a “bountiful” resource that should be managed, not domesticated.

Cole and Native Thought on a “Middle-way”

In the January 1836 edition of American Monthly Magazine, Cole published his famed

“Essay on American Scenery,” which praised America’s wilderness as an opportunity for the nation and for artists alike.26 The opening lines of this work articulate the sentiment he had visualized in The Clove almost ten years earlier. He writes of the American wilderness and white

Americans’ duty to it: “…it is his own land; its beauty its magnificence, its sublimity – all are his; and how undeserving of such a birthright, if he can turn towards it an unobserving eye, an unaffected heart.”27 The essay accepts that industrialization is the path that will take humanity into the future, yet Myers has pointed out that Cole believed in a compromise between development and preservation. Indeed, Myers has stated that such “progress” was compatible with the development of landscape taste in Cole’s opinion.28 Such sentiments are reflected in

Essay. Cole writes: “…it would be well to cultivate the oasis that yet remains to us, and thus preserving the germs of a future and a purer system.”29 He further elucidates this point in a journal entry from the same year:

“If men were not blind and insensible to the beauty of nature the great works necessary for the purpose of Commerce might be carried on without destroying it, and at times might even contribute to her charms by rendering her more accessible – but it is not so [,] they desecrate whatever they touch. They cut down the forest with the wantonness for

26 Kornhauser, Elizabeth M. “Manifesto for an American Sublime: Thomas Cole’s The Oxbow” in Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings. Exh. cat. (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018): 78. 27 Cole, Thomas. “Essay on American Scenery,” originally published in American Monthly Magazine, vol. 1 (January 1836).

28 Myers, “The Catskills,” 39.

29 Cole, “Essay on American Scenery.”

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which there is no excuse … and leave the herbless rocks to glimmer in the burning sun.”30

Such sentiments towards an alternative approach to land cultivation ran against prevailing beliefs, thus making Cole one of the earliest white advocates of environmentalism. J. Michael

Martinez, a scholar of environmental studies, comments on the public acceptance of reckless destruction in his survey of American environmentalism, stating that because Americans of the early-19th century benefited from the advantages of exponential industrialization, they were unwilling to speak against it. He likens industry to a leviathan that grew larger and larger while the public turned a blind eye.31 Martinez champions Henry David Thoreau as one of the earliest critics of this lifestyle. Although working and writing a couple of decades after Cole, Thoreau would be one of the few white voices in the 19th century that rallied for a rejection of industrialized life. His book Walden would champion nature as a sovereign provider for human needs and argue against its decimation (here, Walden was implicitly critiquing naturalists like

James John Audubon, who worked to catalog the birds of America).32

Conversely, as Myers notes, what Cole was calling for in his Essay and private journal was an abandonment of the binary philosophy that had defined western approaches to landscape for centuries: an untouched wilderness versus cultivated and developed land.33 While Cole’s practical motive for his Essay on American Scenery was to call for a “higher version” of

30 Thomas Cole’s Journal, August 6, 1836, quoted in Angela Miller, “The Fate of Wilderness in American Landscape Art: The Dilemmas of “Nature’s Nation,”” in A Keener Perspective, edited by Alan Braddock and Christoph Irmscher. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009): 92-93.

31 Martinez, J. Michael. “The Nineteenth Century” in American Environmentalism: Philosophy, History, and Public Policy, edited by J. Michael Martinez. (Boca Rotan: CRC Press, 2014): 139.

32 Ibid., 153.

33 Myers, “The Catskills,” 40.

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landscape painting, in this text are the seeds of a philosophy of nature. But, while Martinez states that men such as Thoreau and Cole were some of the first to think critically about industrialization, he does not account for Native Americans, who had been practicing such philosophies for generations. In fact, a “middle way” of thinking about the relationship between humanity and nature that Cole alluded to in 1836 had been a way of life for Native Americans for centuries before European contact. In Land and Spirit in Native America, Porter points out that “the written and oral histories of many Native American peoples indicate that their cultures evolved over thousands of years largely in symbiosis with the earth that sustained them.”34 She notes that rituals and practices in Native American tribes had developed with a consciousness of overpopulation in mind, such as the conscious spacing of children and the use of plant contraceptives. Further, she outlines a history of 19th century Native American voices that warned against continued exploitation of the land, such as Tecumseh, Black Hawk, Chief

Seal’th, and Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce.35

To clarify, Cole should not be placed in the same category as these Native American activists, nor should his paintings be exonerated for any deleterious impact they may have had on indigenous peoples. For example, art historian Nancy Palm has done an extensive analysis of how Cole’s Native American subjects promulgated a stereotyped understanding of Native

Americans—one that impacted western policy towards Native Americans not only in the 19th century, but also in the 20th.36 However, he also had a more complicated relationship to Native

34 Porter, Joy. “On Middle way Thinking, Gardens, and Parks,” in Land and Spirit in Native America, edited by Joy Porter. (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2012): 32-34.

35 Ibid., 32.

36 See Palm, Nancy. “Thomas Cole’s Indian Subjects: Racial Politics and the National Landscape,” (PhD dissertation, Indiana University, 2011).

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American culture than previous scholars have addressed.37 As he sought to learn Native place- names—perhaps to add color and history to his paintings—he may also have gleaned something of their way of life.

Whether conscious of it or not, Thomas Cole was interpreting landscapes and nature in a manner that Native Americans had espoused for centuries. This is not to say that Cole was promoting Native culture and goals. In fact, his disappointment in the native name of the falls not being “euphonious” suggests the opposite. It reveals a romanticizing of native history, making

Cole’s research less of an uncovering of history and more of a search for inspiration in unlikely sources. Without realizing it, Cole was working in a pictorial mode that aligned with Native thought. The Clove, Catskills works as an inadvertent embodiment of such philosophy. In this respect, both the Native perspective and Cole’s writings on environment called for an abandonment of the binary that nature is placed in – cultivated versus uncultivated – and rallied for a middle-way that recognizes nature as a collective responsibility and inheritance.

Indeed, most of Cole’s Catskill paintings that picture the wilderness, such as Lake with

Dead Trees (1825), A Snow Squall (1826), and others, echo such sentiments. All of these paintings attend to weather systems, various forms of trees and mountains, cycles of renewal, and wildlife. Such paintings eliminate the human effect on the landscape, even though these sites had already been transformed through reckless industrialization. However, they are not a vision of how these sites formerly appeared, but rather how they could have been and, indeed, how they could be, if Americans change their approach to nature. The sublime elements of nature – storms, cliffs, dead trees, and the like – were not things to be feared, but rather respected for the roles

37 Rebecca Ayres Schwartz, “Historicism and Nostalgia in Thomas Cole’s Last of the Mohicans” James Fenimore Cooper Society Miscellaneous Papers No. 25, (May 2008): 22-24

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they play in nature’s cycle of renewal. Even though Native Americans had lived this philosophy for centuries, westerns had largely overlooked it, seeing the land as a consumable resource instead. As such, Cole’s early paintings are not only an embrace of the wild elements of nature, but also offer his audience an alternative way to perceive it.

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CHAPTER 2

THE CLOVE, CATSKILLS AS A VISION OF THE FUTURE

The Clove, Catskills presents nature as a regenerative ecosystem. Pictured in the transitional season of autumn, the red and gold foliage provide an aesthetic appreciation for the

Northeastern landscape as well as a reminder of the underlying system of preservation at play – the trees preparing themselves for the harsh winter ahead and their eventual rejuvenation in the spring. According to Porter, Native American philosophies assigned humanity the responsibility for maintaining this balance while being careful to not supersede it.38 This reciprocal arrangement would benefit both man and nature. The absence of humanity’s impact on The

Clove in the painting (the omission of fabricated trails, viewing platforms, and deforestation, for example), and Cole’s embrace of the wilderness, are testaments to the artist’s alignment with this philosophy. Further, the absence of figures in the composition, whether Native Americans or white settlers, strengthens the idea that humanity’s impact on the environment should be minimal and untraceable.

The discovery of the pentimento of a Native American figure in the painting, however, complicates things. Not discovered until 1964, after a cleaning by a conservation lab, this

“ghostly” figure takes up the central axis of the composition (Figure 4). Visually, it is an awkward aspect of the work. It is hard to see even in the painting’s cleaned state, for the form and colors in which it is rendered make it blend into its surroundings. Presently, it is transparent; the outline of the rocky outcrop it is placed infringes upon the right leg of the figure, and the foliage from the mountainside in front appears through the figures clear body. No such figures

38 Porter, Joy. “Approaches to Spirituality, Tradition, Land, Wilderness, Nature, Landscape, and Place,” in Land and Spirit in Native America, edited by Joy Porter. (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2012): 11-12.

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appear in any of Cole’s other paintings, suggesting that the artist did not intend him to appear in the final work, but the cleaning has made it a permanent addition. However, scholars have been divided on this point—their approaches falling into one of two camps. The first argues that Cole initially intended to include the figure in the composition, but ultimately painted over it. The second camp argues that the figure was meant to be there from the start and appear in its current

“ghostly” form, which neglects the figure’s awkward relationship to the landscape.39

This chapter adopts the former perspective and, on this basis, considers why Cole would have “erased” the figure. By analyzing how similar, but fully realized Native American figures operate in other Catskill scenes painted by Cole around this time, this chapter argues that such paintings are reliant on tropes and stereotypical depictions of Native Americans that were being propagated in popular literature of the time, thereby making these scenes read as past. Thus, by omitting the figure from the final composition, Cole’s idealized version of the Kaaterskill Clove remains in the present and perhaps even speaks to the future. Indeed, his vision of the wilderness would be presented to contemporary elite audiences as one example of the country’s trajectory should Americans change their vexing relationship towards the wild. The Clove, Catskills, then, not only serves as the pictorial embodiment of Cole’s proto-environmentalist sentiments, but also works as an attempt to persuade the very industrialists that were ravaging the land. That Cole would eventually have to outrightly publish these sentiments in his Essay on American Scenery just under a decade after illustrated that his subtle approach to environmentalism was ultimately ineffective. However, The Clove marks Cole’s efforts to present this case visually.

39 Kusserow, Karl. “The Trouble with Empire.” In Nature’s Nation: American Art and the Environment, edited by Kar; Kusserow and Alan C. Braddock. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019): 103.

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The Discovery of the Pentimento

In order to understand Cole’s reasoning for striking the Native figure from the composition, it is important to understand how it became visible in the first place. On March

30th, 1964, Sanford B.D. Low, director of the New Britain Museum of American Art, received a report from Fine Arts Conservation Laboratories Inc., describing how The Clove, Catskills had— per the museum’s request—been cleaned and restored. The report revealed no abnormalities during restoration; it was a standard cleaning, inpainting and realignment.40 However, as soon as the painting was returned to the museum, Low saw something that was not visible before: the brown and orange outline of the Native American figure. Low’s initial confusion about this discovery can be seen in a letter to the painter’s former owner, gallerist Robert Vose, written just two days later. While requesting a photograph of the work from Vose, in the hope of comparing the painting in both its past and present state, he writes: “Oddly enough, there is a slight suggestion of an Indian standing in the middle of the painting which I can’t remember ever being there before. If it was, then the painting has been over-cleaned. If not, it was so damn dirty that the cleaning has brought the outline of the Indian into view.”41 A few days later, Vose sent a photograph to Low along with the following response: “Enclosed is the only print we have of your Thomas Cole. I don’t remember the Indian of whom you speak, and cannot make him out in this photograph. Are you sure you haven’t changed your brand of refreshment lately?”42 Without

40 Invoice and treatment report from Fine Arts Conservation Laboratories Inc. to Sanford B.D. Low, March 30, 1964. Folder: Cole, Thomas: Provenance 1801 – 1848. The Clove, Catskills object files from The New Britain Museum of American Art archives.

41 Letter from Sanford B.D. Low to Robert Vose, April 1, 1964. Folder: Cole, Thomas: Provenance 1801 – 1848. The Clove, Catskills object files from The New Britain Museum of American Art archives.

42 Letter from Robert Vose to Sanford B.D. Low, April 6, 1964. Folder: Cole, Thomas: Provenance 1801 – 1848. The Clove, Catskills object files from The New Britain Museum of American Art archives.

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access to the photos mentioned in this correspondence, it is hard to compare the painting in its former and current states. However, the doubts conveyed by Vose, and Low’s second guessing concerning the figure’s existence, suggest that it was not visible before the cleaning.

Vose’s humorous response underscores the magnitude of such a discovery. Up until this point, the version of The Clove, Catskills with which Vose had become familiar was unpopulated. The conservation laboratory, realizing their mistake in not notifying Low about their “discovery” of the figure, expressed their apologies and offered to cover him up (essentially re-erasing him). The choice was placed on Low. By choosing to cover up the figure, the painting would read like Cole’s other landscape paintings, like Lake with Dead Trees (1825) or Snow

Squall (1825), which were not populated by humans. The inverse would introduce a human figure into the composition. It would also associate the work with other paintings by Cole featuring Native Americans. Further, the painting would be thrust into a complex history of artistic and other depictions of indigenous people. Ultimately, Low made the decision to keep the figure, albeit in this odd, ghostly form. His response to the conservation lab reveals that he believed he was following through with Cole’s original intentions—that the figure was meant to be there all along. He wrote: “We would under no conditions have the Indian removed as it certainly was the cleaning that made his discovery possible. I am of the opinion that Cole sketched him in as an outline drawing in color, felt he added nothing to the picture or Cole forgot to finish him. I doubt very much if it were ever “skinned”.”43

Low’s choice of words – “We would under no conditions have the Indian removed” – was indicative of the changing social conscious surrounding Native American history in the

43 Letter from Sanford B.D. Low to George A. Douglass, Jr., April 8, 1964. Folder: Cole, Thomas: Provenance 1801 – 1848. The Clove, Catskills object files from The New Britain Museum of American Art archives

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1960s. With the rise of the civil rights movement, the history of American and Native American relations was being thoroughly reexamined. Long-held assumptions were being challenged, specifically the perception of Native Americans as a governmental problem solved by constant relocation. Federal relocation policies issued and enforced in the previous decade drew the ire of

Native American communities, resulting in protests and civilian occupations of government spaces.44 A reevaluation of Native American and government relations was on the rise;

Americans began to view Native Americans as a historically oppressed minority victimized by

19th- and 20th-century land policies that favored the extinction of Native cultures and traditions.45

Native communities had reached their boiling point, with the 1960s seeing the beginnings of hard pushes towards land reparations that continue to this day. The evolving political discourse surrounding Native American relocation and reparations may have played a role in Low’s decision to keep the Native American figure in The Clove, Catskills. In fact, covering the figure would have been an ironic reenactment of the same type of erasure that had befallen the Native people. With this in mind, the decision placed the museum on the right side of history – against the systematic erasure of Native Americans. But, as noted, it also appears to have gone against

Cole’s wishes.

Two Scenes of Kaaterskill Falls and the “Noble Savage”

Around the same time Cole erased the Native figure in The Clove, Catskills, he painted several other works that included them. Exploring the significance of the Native figures in these works helps explain their function in the artist’s work and what it would mean to eliminate them.

44 Horton, Jessica L. “The Word for World and the Word for History are the Same: Jimmie Durham, The American Indian Movement, and Spatial Thinking” in Art for an Undivided Earth: The American Indian Movement Generation, edited by Jessica L. Horton. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017): 23.

45 Flavin, Francis. Native Americans and American History. Essay published by the National Parks Service. (2004): 1.

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The falls of “Quatawickknaak” – eventually rechristened to the Dutch name Kaaterskill falls – were the focus of two paintings that launched Cole’s career when he was just starting out as a painter: Kaaterskill Falls (1825) and Falls of Kaaterskill (1826) (Figures 5 and 6). These paintings depict the falls from differing vantage points—one from inside and behind the high waterfall and the other from across the valley—and both feature small figures of Native

Americans in their central axis. In these works, in keeping with popular understandings of Native culture, Cole depicted the Native Americans as “noble savages” and, thereby, located the scenes in the past. Nancy Palm defines this trope as a Native American “typically portrayed as primitive, simple, and unencumbered by civilization, carrying a sense of calmness and dignity, and a certain innocence that came from a natural existence.”46 Looking at these works enables us to see the model that—in The Clove, Catskills at least—Cole sought to avoid.

In both these paintings, the small, but noticeable Native American figures are pictured looking out into the distance at something we cannot see. They stand immediately over the precipitous drop on a jagged outcrop, seemingly unafraid of the danger before them. Cole dresses them in the same outfit that matches the colors of the surrounding foliage—a brownish orange garb with bright white trimmings—but their bodies remain visible; one shoulder and legs are exposed. Their headdresses match the curvilinear shapes of the organic forms around them.

Indeed, these figures were meant to match the scenery, implying a connection between man and nature. (In fact, given the similarities between the two men, one could argue that Cole may have intended for these paintings to be companion pieces—each depicting the same person from a different vantage point.47) However, because of popular media of the 19th century, the very

46 Palm, Thomas Cole’s Indian Subjects, 88.

47 If this is the case, then a further point can be made that these “Kaaterskill Falls” paintings are intended to be a series in the same vein of other series by Cole where a single object or person is followed throughout multiple 27

symbols that mark them as “noble savages” also mark them as a dying breed. Americans had been conditioned to believe that such Native people were a product of an era long gone, facing their extinction with humility. Indeed, indigenous people and their demise were considered the prologue to American history.48

The idea of the “noble savage,” facing his fate with humility and acceptance, was promulgated in popular literature in the early 1820s, when Cole was making these works. This literary model was immortalized in the novels by James Fenimore Cooper, with none being more influential than The Last of the Mohicans (1826).49 Set in 1757 during the French and Indian

War, it tells the story of the white scout Hawk-eye escorting a General’s two daughters from one military base to another—a simple feat that quickly goes awry. Hawk-eye and his two Native

American companions, the Mohican warriors Chingachgook and Uncas, father and son, respectively, battle through hordes of “red devils” (the antonym to the “noble savage”) in order to rescue the kidnapped Cora and Alice Munro. His Mohican companions are self-dubbed the

“last” of their tribe, as there are no Mohican women for the young Uncas to marry and

Chingachgook was too old to produce more children. The introduction of these two, however, sees them at peace with this troubling fact of their existence. The two seem content to live with

Hawk-eye as nomads in the wilderness, awaiting their inevitable extinction with “calmness and dignity.”

Cooper’s Mohicans adhere to the literary model of the “noble savage” as defined by

Palm: beings that are unencumbered by civilization, with a special connection to nature, and who

canvases. If so, then in these 1825 paintings lay the beginnings of what would become fleshed out narratives such as The Course of Empire (1836), The Voyage of Life (1842), and The Cross and the World (1848, unfinished).

48 Dippie., “The Anatomy of the Vanishing American,” 24.

49 Ibid.

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wait out their doom. Throughout the story, Chingachgook and Uncas both exhibit a calm demeanor, even in the face of certain danger, fighting only when provoked. Their bodies, nearly naked, decorated in paint and their semi-shaved heads garnished with feather plumes speak to a culture untouched by “civilization.” Further, Cooper grants them an almost supernatural ability to hide among the forest; the story features many scenes in which these two men blend into the wilderness to track or strike their enemies. This suggests that their appearance camouflages them into their surroundings - the woods and mountains of upstate New York. It reveals a connection to nature only possible through the “noble savage’s” ignorance of modern civilization.

These are the very same characteristics that Cole ascribes to his Native Americans; it is clear that Cole was looking to these fictional characters as models. Cole’s figures confidently stand on their respective cliff’s edge, unfazed by the precipitous drop before them. Their calmness in the face of the dark wilderness ahead speaks towards their familiarity with such sights. Their feathered headdress evokes the plumage that decorated the heads of Uncas and

Chingachgook. The colors of their garb echo those of the surrounding autumn foliage, suggesting not only the similar sense of blending in with the wilderness granted to the fictional Mohicans, but a connection to nature that comes from a “natural” existence—one unspoiled by civilization.

Indeed, Cole relied on this stereotypical understanding of Native Americans in his depictions of them. As stated in chapter one, by the time Cole was working in the Catskills the actual

Mohicans and Esopus tribes were long gone from the area. Their history was either erased by

“rechristenings” of their former homes to Dutch and English names or buried underneath complex land deeds. It is no coincidence that the Falls paintings are some of the earliest, if not the first, depictions of Native Americans in Cole’s oeuvre. They were possibly influenced by the

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artist’s reading of Cooper’s novel in the summer of 1826.50 That Cole should begin depicting

Native Americans as “noble savages” the same year of The Last of the Mohicans’ release is telling of the novel’s immediate impact. That Cole chose to create scenes from the story on multiple canvases in the years following is even more telling.51

Palm has argued that Cole’s “noble savages” were meant to read as antonyms to white settlement. 52 Indeed, in these works, Native figures stand as substitutes for signs of industry. By the 1820s, the Kaaterskill falls would be one of the most popular and heavily visited features of the Catskills, even more popular than the Clove. As such, industrialists exploited the falls for profit. Besides providing viewing platforms for optimal enjoyment, it is said that the sawmill that provided the lumber for the Catskill Mountain House also dammed the flow of water. In order to release water into the falls, a dam operator would lower a basket from the top of the falls to tourists waiting on the first escarpment. These tourists would drop money into the basket, which the operator would collect and then release the water flow.53 Both of Cole’s paintings show no trace of the dam or viewing platforms, despite capturing such installations in his sketches of the scene from the same year. But while he similarly omits signs of industry from The Clove,

Catskills, these works, unlike that one, include Native American figures. Cole depicts these figures following Cooper’s lead, thereby marking them as remnants of a lost world. He thus

50 Parry, Ellwood C. “Cooper, Cole, and The Last of the Mohicans”, in Art and the Native American: Perceptions, Reality, and Influences, edited by Mary Louise Krumrine, (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001): 149.

51 Ibid.

52 Palm, Nancy. “Thomas Cole’s Indian Subjects: Racial Politics and the National Landscape,” (PhD dissertation, Indiana University, 2011), 88.

53 Schuyler, David. “The Tourist’s River.” In Sanctified Landscape: Writers, Artists, and the Hudson River Valley, 1820-1909, edited by David Schuyler. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012): 22.

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plucks the scene from the present and immerses it in the pre-industrial past in which The Last of the Mohicans itself was also set.

Art historian Jessica Horton explains why Western culture has associated Native

Americans with the past. She notes that the European episteme “grants primacy to progress, envisioning history as the teleological conquest of empty space by humans advancing through stages of civilization….” She asserts that Native Americans, being considered an impediment to

“civilized” progress for centuries, have been left out of this narrative. “Rather than recognizing indigenes as coeval inhabitants of a shared earth, this cosmology construes Natives of the “New

World” as primitives locked in an earlier stage of a single, dominant narrative of history.”54

Simply put, because Native Americans are not given the privilege of being associated with

“progress,” being considered an impediment to industrialization, they are read as the opposite of it. Whether conscious of it or not, this is the very function of Cole’s Native American figures.

They personified the pre-industrialist past.

The Intended Audience for The Clove, Catskills and a Call for Change

The Clove, Catskills was submitted among six paintings to the second annual exhibition at The National Academy of Design in 1827. An anonymous critic praised the young Cole’s developing sense of landscape, claiming his unique vision as a “fertile invention and grand conception.”55 This quote reveals that even contemporary audiences understood that Cole’s depiction of these popular sites were imagined, or not accurate depictions. Being presented at such a prestigious and exclusive event, it made sense that most of the audience would be made up of the elite that knew such sites all too well, having most likely visited as tourists and stayed

54 Horton, Word for World, 24.

55 The United States Review and Literature Gazette, vol. 2, no. 4 (July 1827): 249-250.

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at the Catskill Mountain House.56 Cole’s unspoiled versions of these sites endeared him to such an audience. Ironically, it was the very industrialists that Cole would criticize in his future writing that were the most avid buyers of these paintings, perhaps drawn in by the unspoiled landscape that the “noble savage” represented, the abundance of resources that attracted them to this region in the first place.

With an understanding of the intricacies of nature, the ecosystems he observed from direct observation and study, the loss of such bountiful landscapes was even more painful for

Cole.57 Here, in this art institution filled with the very businessmen responsible for the ravaging of his beloved forests, Cole, benefiting from his rising stardom, would spread his message of preservation of the wilderness. The Clove, Catskills served as a subtle protest. In this painting, presented at this show, The Clove, Catskills argued for minimal human intervention into the landscape. Further, with no signifiers of the past, it was also a possible future for the Catskills, should the elite and industrialists change their ways. Essentially, Cole depicted the popular site not as it once was, but as what it could be if humanity (more specifically, the audience in this exhibition) prioritized sustainability.

However, several indicators reveal that Cole’s intended message either did not appeal to industrial audiences or was simply too subtle in its execution. The exhibition record indicates that The Clove, Catskills was last on the artist’s roster, labeled number 86, while more well- known works such as Scene from “The Last of the Mohicans” and St. John in the Wilderness were labeled numbers 11 and 16, respectively. If this numbering pertains to the layout of the

56 Roland Van Zandt. “The First Two Decades” from The Catskill Mountain House edited by Roland Van Zandt. (Hensonville: Black Dome Press: 1966): 42

57 Kornhauser, Elizabeth M. “Manifesto for an American Sublime: Thomas Cole’s The Oxbow” in Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings. Exh. cat. (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018): 89.

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exhibition, it would seem that The Clove did not get the same spotlight as Cole’s other work.

This could be a matter of practicality, as the other two paintings measure much larger than The

Clove. But it most likely was due to the popularity of the subjects of these paintings; Cooper’s novel was still receiving praise as a best seller, and the biblical subject of St. John in the

Wilderness may have been given priority over Cole’s landscape.

Second, the record clearly states that the Last of the Mohicans is for sale but does not indicate the same for The Clove. Perhaps Cole relied on the popularity of the subject to attract a buyer, which worked as the record also indicates it was sold at the show. However, records do not reveal a buyer for The Clove, Catskills, suggesting that this proto-environmentalist work did not appeal to the crowd of wealthy industrialist patrons. In fact, records indicate that the painting did not find a buyer until 1867, when either Cole’s estate or an unidentified owner sold it to John

Harrison Levy, an industrialist known for revolutionizing the steam boiler at the time, making train engines more efficient.58 The irony that an industrialist bought this environmentalist work would come to define Cole’s career, as his most loyal patrons were railroad and factory owners.59 Indeed, as Alan Wallach has explicitly noted throughout his scholarship on the artist,

Cole’s call for humanity to change its industrial ways seemed to go right over the heads of the very people viewing and buying these works.60

With his call for change largely ignored, it is no surprise that Cole’s frustrations with the industrial elite festered until the point where subtlety was no longer an option. If The Clove,

58 “National Academy of Design Exhibition Records: 1826-1860,” page 87. Located in Folder: Cole, Thomas: Provenance 1801 – 1848. The Clove, Catskills object files from The New Britain Museum of American Art Archives

59 Kornhauser, Elizabeth, M. “Manifesto for an American Sublime,” 89.

60 Wallach, Alan. “Thomas Cole’s River in the Catskills as Anti-pastoral,” in The Art Bulletin, vol. 84. No. 2 (June, 2002): 347 33

Catskills marks a time where the young Cole was still optimistic about the nation’s future and the preservation of the wilderness, then the sentiments and lamentations expressed in Essay on

American Scenery and its companion artwork View from Mount Holyoke, Massachusetts, after a

Thunderstorm – The Oxbow (1836) serves as an outright decree and manifesto for change.61

Scholars have asserted that the diagonal composition of The Oxbow, being divided into two parts representing the wild and the cultivated, represents the crossroads that Cole felt humanity had reached and that subtle hints in the picture suggests that Cole felt pessimistic about the road he knows humanity would inevitably choose.62 Conversely, The Clove, Catskills, features no such division; it is a bountiful and fruitful site. By the time he published American Scenery and exhibited The Oxbow, Cole had grown from a hopeful young artist to an established painter fully aware that the wilderness would be a fleeting memory if he did not explicitly intervene.

It is ironic that a Native American figure would have impeded Cole’s vision of the Clove as a sustainable resource, a sentiment that so closely aligns with Native American philosophy.

Just as ironic is that this message was lost on the audience of industrialists that Cole was hoping to appeal to. However, because the artist’s only frame of reference for indigenous people at the time was through the twisted lens provided by popular literature and the “noble savage” trope,

Cole’s Native American figures adhered to these stereotypes, thus placing such scenes in the past. By striking the Native figure in The Clove, Catskills, Cole provided an alternate view of the future—one where wilderness could still be a resource while still being respected and preserved.

These philosophies would be outrightly explained, even clearly laid out in Cole’s work as he grew older. Like the “noble savages” that he pictured, however, Cole realized that his philosophy

61 Ibid., 78.

62 Ibid., 89.

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was doomed, and that the future was mechanical. As such, The Clove represents a time when the young Cole, just off the heels of a successful debut and still taking in the newfound beauty of the

Catskill Mountains, held on to the belief that humanity would come around from its wasteful ways and, perhaps naively, offered to show them a way to a sustainable future.

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CONCLUSION

With the twenty-first century seeing the negative effects of Euro-American industrialization finally taking its toll, Joy Porter asserts that Western culture is beginning to seek out and heed indigenous perspectives on land and conservation.63 Indeed, it is safe to say that such effects are precisely what 19th century Native American environmentalists warned about, and the devastating loss of land and wilderness is what Thomas Cole hoped to avoid but ultimately witnessed. As such, The Clove, Catskills presents a vision of the future that Cole hoped his paintings could bring about. Such depictions of the Catskill wilderness as wild, remote, and bountiful sites fell in line with the way that Native Americans had perceived the wilderness for generations. Whether he was aware of native beliefs or not, Cole certainly shared them. They charted his vision for the future of the Catskills.

Consider another version of the Clove that he created around the same time in which the artist makes a similar point. In Stony Gap, Kaaterskill Clove (1826-27) Cole pictures the site from the bottom of the precipitous drop picture in The Clove. Absent are all of the tanneries or villages in the region at the time. Instead, Cole pays attention to the ecosystem at work. The foreground features blasted and dead tree forms. A calm river separates these trees from their sunlit siblings that are drinking from the running water, refreshing their bare, dry branches.

Overhead, a brewing storm begins to envelop the land, overtaking the already intimidating peak of the mountain summit. Cole positions the viewer in the middle of a hostile exchange between natural elements. However, these elements are composed in a manner that circle back to each other. The dead trees nourish the soil around them, feeding other trees such as those found across

63 Porter, Joy. “Introduction,” in Land and Spirit in Native America, edited by Joy Porter. (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2012): xv.

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the way. The brewing storm is coming along to not only nourish the trees with its water but replenish the rivers source. Some other trees may be struck down during the storm, but they will serve to further nourish their brethren. In the middle of this composition, Cole explicitly illuminates a group of trees whose branches hang in the water. It is a reminder that the death pictured in this painting is a necessary part of ongoing life and renewal. Nature’s processes, albeit intimidating, work to keep the natural order intact. Any sign of humanity, if any, is miniscule echoing the belief that man’s effect on such landscapes should be untraceable.

It is from this work, as well as other paintings in Cole’s Catskill oeuvre, that we see a conscious understanding and appreciation of natural systems—one that falls in line with Native

American philosophy. For Cole, as well as Native American environmentalists, the wilderness was to be preserved and protected, not profited from. A sustainable future, one that was preached by Native American activists and embodied in Cole’s paintings, was within reach. But for now, we look to Cole’s work as somber reminders of what could have been and hope that the messages within them light a path towards the future that Cole imagined.

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ILLUSTRATIONS

Due to copyright restrictions, the illustrations for this thesis are only available in the hard copy version that is on file in the Visual Resources Center in the Katzen Arts Center at American

University

Figure 1. John Rubens Smith, Catskill Mountain House, 1830. Aquatint with hand-color on paper.

Figure 2. Thomas Cole, The Clove, Catskills, 1827. Oil on canvas.

Figure 3. Guy Johnson’s Map of the Six Nations, 1771.

Figure 4. Detail of The Clove, Catskills. The colored outline of a Native American figure.

Figure 5. Thomas Cole, Kaaterskill Falls, 1826. Oil on canvas. Wadsworth Atheneum.

Figure 6. Thomas Cole, The Falls of Kaaterskill, 1826. Oil on canvas.

Figure 7. Thomas Cole, Stony Gap, Kaaterskill Clove, 1826-27. Oil on canvas.

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