Oxbow Archive

On a summer morning in 1833, Thomas Cole, a British-born, American landscape painter climbed to the top of Mount Holyoke in central Massachusetts and made a sketch of the Connecticut River where it bends and resembles an ox yoke. Three years later the sketch he made that morning became View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm (The Oxbow). The American photographic artist, Joel Sternfeld, walked into the mile square field depicted in the lower right quadrant of Cole's painting. Sternfeld had first photographed this field in 1978 while traveling on American Prospects. By the time he returned in 2006, the Oxbow in the river was crossed by an interstate highway and the destructive effects of progress that Cole had feared were making themselves apparent globally as climate change. The four by six foot painting, now a key work of American art has been described as Cole's attempt to create a moving time/space panorama within a single frame - the passage of time is represented by the ongoing fury of the storm on the mountain as sunshine returns to the meadow below.