Scene from The Last of the Mohicans

Thomas Cole painted this work in 1827, the same year he was establishing himself as the leading figure of what would become the Hudson River School. Cooper's novel, published in 1826, had created an instant sensation, and Cole responded with a painting that is as much a meditation on the American wilderness as it is an illustration of a literary episode. Cole was then in his mid-twenties, recently arrived from England, and already committed to the idea that American landscape carried a moral weight unavailable to European scenery: untamed, sublime, and freighted with the consciousness that it was vanishing. The choice of the Romantic sublime as a compositional grammar, with its tiny figures dwarfed beneath monumental geology, was entirely deliberate. The painting entered the collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, where it has been held as a foundational document of American landscape painting. Scholars read it as an early statement of Cole's conviction that the fate of the American continent, including the fate of its indigenous peoples, was inseparable from the fate of the land itself.