Sunrise in the Catskills

Thomas Cole

National Gallery of Art

Hulking mountains are mostly backlit against a watery blue sky edged with shell pink along the horizon, which comes about two-thirds of the way up this horizontal landscape painting. Light falls across felled and gnarled trees along the bottom edge of the canvas. Two thin trunks, one of them broken to a jagged point, rise along the left edge of the composition with their green leaves outlined against the sky. The land dips steeply away into a valley wending between forested mountains. Fog has settled along the valley like a river of mist. The mountains lighten from dark, earthy green and brown close to us to muted fawn-brown in the distance. A sliver of pale-yellow sun peeks over the summit of the nearest mountain, which is to our left. Clouds kick up over the distant mountaintops, and a few wisps of peach-colored clouds float across the blue sky above. The artist signed and dated the work in black paint on a branch on the ground in the lower center, “T. Cole 1826.”