Measured against geological time, Kaaterskill Falls in Upstate New York is remarkably young. Formed by melting glacial runoff that carved through sandstone and shale at the base of the Catskills’ South Mountain during the middle Pleistocene — about 130,000 years ago — it is a dramatic two-tiered waterfall that appears to almost spring down its 260-foot (~79-meter) drop. Two hundred years ago, that rushing scene would inspire a 25-year-old engraver born in Lancashire, England, who sought to create a distinctly new American aesthetic. Thomas Cole’s “Kaaterskill Falls” of 1826, now on view at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, announced that emerging movement.
With “Kaaterskill Falls,” Cole decisively overturned the portrait tradition that had defined late colonial and early Republican American art in the manner of Gilbert Stuart and Rembrandt Peale. Where that earlier work was restrained, formal, classical, and European, Cole’s adopted American vision made a declaration of independence from the art academies of London and Paris. The painting seems to be seen from the rock shelter behind the falls, presenting the forceful water as it rushes into the creek below, enclosed by autumn leaves of Eastern Hemlocks, Northern Red Oaks, Sugar Maples, and American Beeches in green, red, orange, and brown.
Through the mist and haze of water droplets, the sun sinks into a bleeding dusk, while black clouds draw night in. In 1757, the Anglo-Irish philosopher Edmund Burke wrote in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, “The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is astonishment.” Burke’s ideas became an early rallying point for Romanticism, and they were first fully realized in the American landscape, the only inheritance the young Republic had yet to claim.
Cole’s painting thus stands not only as a work of scenery, but also as a foundational statement of artistic identity. In its scale, atmosphere, and emotional force, “Kaaterskill Falls” helped define the visual language that would come to be associated with the Hudson River School. The waterfall’s grandeur became a symbol of a nation discovering its own image in the wilderness.
