Mount Chocorua, New Hampshire

Thomas Cole’s remarkable depictions of the American wilderness launched America’s first native art movement, the Hudson River School. This tradition of landscape painting dominated the first part of the nineteenth century and helped Americans formulate a nationalistic interest in the grandeur and scenic beauty of nature found in their own country’s terrain. First visited by the artist in 1827—the year the present work was painted—Mount Chocorua in the White Mountains of New Hampshire would become one of Cole’s favorite subjects. Painting the distinct peak more than a dozen times over the remaining two decades of his career, Cole delighted in not only the formal artistic experiments that the geology inspired, but also as Robert L. McGrath writes, “For Cole, Chocorua served both at the beginning and at the end of his career as a symbolic mountain, a place where the artist explored the broad spectrum of American mythologies as he sought to create a distinctive cultural identity for the nation.” (Gods in Granite, New York, 2001, p. 45)

Cole was born in Lancashire, England in 1801 and immigrated with his family to Philadelphia at the age of eighteen before leaving for New York in 1825. He captured the immediate attention of the New York art world following his first sketching trip up the Hudson River that summer, and in 1827 moved to the village of Catskill. Cole’s first visit to New Hampshire in July and August of 1927 was at the behest of his important patron Daniel Wadsworth of Hartford, Connecticut, who was awed by the beauty of the area on a visit the year prior. Cole, accompanied by fellow artist-explorer Henry Cheever Pratt, stayed at Ethan Allen Crawford’s Inn, visited Lake Winnipesaukee and climbed Mount Washington on this first expedition.

Fascinated with the views of Mount Chocorua, Cole painted multiple landscapes featuring the mountain that year, including Corroway Peak, N.H.—After Sunset (now lost), Lake Winnepesaukee (Albany Institute of History and Art) and the present work. In this important early depiction of the subject, the mountain epitomizes notions of the sublime, backlit by an ethereal glowing sun which elevates the rural landscape to the realm of the divine.

Mount Chocorua had also notably been the subject of a popular 1825 poem called Jeckoyva by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, which detailed the popular legend of the Indian chief Chocorua seeking vengeance for his family and choosing a heroic death atop the mountain rather than surrender to his foes. Perhaps inspired by this tragic tale that stirred the romantic poets of the era, Cole also included Mount Chocorua within a number of his ambitious imagined scenes of the era, such as Scene from "The Last of the Mohicans,” Cora Kneeling at the Feet of Tamenund (1827, Wadsworth Atheneum) and The Garden of Eden (1828, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas).

In October of 1828, Cole returned to the White Mountains and this time not only admired Chocorua from a distance but also ascended the peak. He described in his journal entry for October 3, 1828:

"We gained the summit and were rewarded for our labours. A sublime prospect opened on every side. Lakes, mountains, streams, forests, villages & farms lay spread beneath us like a beautiful carpet. Some of the numerous lakes shone like silver…The view was sublime but not a scene for the canvass…It was not for pictures I ascended the mountain but for ideas of grandeur, for conceptions, and for these, this was the region.”

This poetic description of his experience atop Chocorua underscores the importance of this landscape for Cole’s development as an artist. By the 1820s in the United States, aesthetic notions of the Beautiful, the Sublime and the Picturesque prevailed in artistic theory. The tensions between picturesque, natural beauty and its counterpart—the anxious unknown implicit in a wild, unconquered terrain—were played out visually by Cole through formal compositional devices like sweeping, crossed diagonals and dramatically heightened contrasts between sunlight and shadow. As Robert L. McGrath describes, “More emotively charged than contemporary scenes inspired by picturesque aesthetics, Cole’s work contains a dramatic foreground, selectively lighted...By way of strengthening the emotional effects of the canvas, the stark silhouette of a foreground tree writhes in anthropomorphic spasms while leading the viewer’s eye toward the distant mountains. Finally, the natural elements of earth, water, and sky are dramatically conjoined to invest the narrative with the quality of some deep and ineffable mystery.” (Gods in Granite, p. 35)

Indeed, the present composition builds around a classic Cole device of an X-shaped arrangement of diagonal lines, which imbues the steep mountainsides and broken tree trunks with a sense of the untamed, almost menacing wilderness. At the same time, the young fisherman in the foreground not only provides a pop of red color amongst the greenery, but also grounds the composition in reality, serving as a subtle reminder of man’s impact on the natural world. In the present work in particular, “Compared to the views that probably preceded this one, Cole introduced additional signs of civilization. Some of the tree trunks in the foreground were smoothly cut, as if by a saw; just above the young boy fishing, a few cows have wandered down to the water; and around the log cabin in a clearing in the middle ground there is evidence of an active farm in operation.” (E.C. Parry III, The Art of Thomas Cole: Ambition and Imagination, Newark, Delaware, 1988, p. 59) The painting thus perfectly encapsulates the tension between the sublime and the picturesque, the wild and the cultivated, which Cole propagated into the unique form of landscape painting that would birth the American Hudson River School.

Describing the important connection between Cole and Mount Chocorua, McGrath declares, “Surely no other mountain in the history of American art—with the notable exception of Mount Katahdin—served so well, nor was so well served by a landscape painter.” He continues, “In terms of the broader history of American art, no mountain has figured more prominently in the representation of the national landscape. Without exception, Chocorua has been more frequently depicted than any other peak.” (Gods in Granite, p. 45) Indeed, Cole not only influenced generations of American landscape painters in their approach and style, but also specifically began a tradition of Mount Chocorua painters. Particularly in the 1850s, the White Mountains became an extraordinarily popular subject for artists following in Cole’s footsteps, including Jasper Francis Cropsey, Asher B. Durand, Sanford Gifford and many others. Yet, as felt in the present early masterwork depicting the subject, “Despite such persistent efforts by artists and writers to reformulate the aesthetics of the landscape, an aura of sublime mystery continued to be associated with Mount Chocorua.” (Gods in Granite, p. 45)

The original owner of Mount Chocorua, New Hampshire was James Abraham Hillhouse of New Haven, Connecticut. Hillhouse was known for planting much of New Haven with elm trees, and also superintended the construction of the Farmington Canal that connected Long Island Sound to Northampton, Massachusetts. With Hillhouse’s permission as the work’s new owner, Cole exhibited the present painting at the National Academy of Design annual exhibition in 1828.