The Oxbow

Thomas Cole was an English-born American artist who founded the Hudson River School art movement. He painted romantic landscapes and history paintings. Influenced by European painters, but with a strong American sensibility, he was prolific throughout his career and worked primarily with oil on canvas.

View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm, commonly known as The Oxbow, is a seminal American landscape painting by Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School. The 1836 painting depicts a Romantic panorama of the Connecticut River Valley just after a thunderstorm. It has been interpreted as a confrontation between wilderness and civilization.