Thomas Cole's "River in the Catskills" as Antipastoral

Abstract

Art historians and American Studies scholars have interpreted Cole's River in the Catskills (1843)—a landscape view that includes a train—as a pastoral. This article maintains that Cole intended River in the Catskills as an antipastoral—as a deliberate attack on the conventions of pastoral landscape painting and consequently on a pervasive, if often contested, ideology that lauded improvement and material progress. Through an examination of historical and visual evidence and an analysis of the work's landscape painting conventions, the article aims to recover meanings the painting may have held for the artist and for some of his contemporaries.