Day 287 - Cole and Tivoli

March 11, 2022

I had thought that gallery 759 was the large space containing Leutze's monumental painting of Washington crossing the Delaware, along with many smaller works, and was rather dreading the long visit it would require. Instead, the gallery turns out to be a smaller (although still sizable) room devoted to works of the Hudson River school.  The first painting I see, opposite the entrance, makes me wonder,  "Can it be?" And it is: Thomas Cole's iconic painting of the oxbow of the Connecticut River painted from the top of Mount Holyoke. The painting brings tears to my eyes, I think because  it  depicts a landscape that is so familiar and so beloved - and because it reminds me of my young years, not necessarily such happy ones, but irretrievably gone Seeing it two days after my 74th birthday undoubtedly reinforces these feelings.

The work I want to write about, however, is a small (approximately 15" by 24") oil that Cole painted in 1831 entitled "A View Near Tivoli."  Maybe at one point I knew that Cole had traveled in Europe, but if so, I'd forgotten that fact. The painting shows, in the foreground, an old stone arch, now given over to vegetation, in the middle distance an old aqueduct, and in the background, the foothills of mountains from which morning mists rise and fuse with the lowering clouds.  The scene is a reminder that, in the end, nature will overtake man's creations. I really like the artist's  free use of the paint, the dabs and loose strokes. It makes me think that Cole was an Impressionist before his time, although I read that while he sketched the scene en plein air, he executed the painting in his studio.

It occurs to me that the two Cole paintings embody my love for the Pioneer Valley and for Italy - two passions that arose early (and pretty much at the same time, when I was an impressionable early adolescent) and that persist to this day.



 

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