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PARTISAN REVIEW
within? It shows a crusty hunting party huddling around a fire
on the dark side of the mountain while the sun's last rays bathe
the other side. Thus one has dusk and dark at a glance, through
the happy chance of their seeking shelter out of the sun. We can
call it a literary vision because it shows successive stages, pre–
tending it can see both at once.
More modest painters found more ingenious solutions to the
problem of how to populate the wilderness without losing what
made us seek it as a subject in the first place. John Frederick
Kensett is an inconspicuous painter who comes thirty years after
Cole and is something of a favorite nowadays because of the
chilly mathematical look he gives to natural forms, which
makes an uncanny appeal to us heirs of Cubism, Constructivism,
and later minimalisms. Many Kensetts look as if the people have
been taken away, perhaps because his precision seems a very
civilized quality, perhaps because in the midst of savage boulders
is a little rickety bridge, with no one on it.
The most interesting picture in the exhibition from this point
of view is of Lake George: largish islands are dotted in such a
speaking pattern-separate from one another yet forming a
group-that it seems a fascinating answer to the problem of how .
one insinuates one's puny self into these grand expanses. These
lumps serve much the same formal function as those picturesque
observers, of whom by now we are so very tired.
One way of deserting the wilderness, or betraying it, is sub–
tly to populate it. In this class I would include even the stirring vi–
sions of lone warriors in their canoes heading toward a distant
shore, on which wait their lone squaws. Why is it always twi–
light when they set out? Why is wilderness most paintable at the
end of the day in the downward quarter of the year? Because one
imagines that it is really gone already.
This doesn't seem exactly the spirit in which Thomas Cole
left or wanted to leave the wilderness as a subject. In the 1830s
Cole became tired of painting recognizable places and turned
more and more to busy Gothic visions (still set in Hudson-type
landscapes) or denatured religious allegories. Cole may not be so
much weaker as an allegorist as he seems to me. Most people ap–
pear not to think so. Maybe it is just difficult to switch ideologies
quickly while moving around a single room. Still, it isn't that the
allegories are painted worse, just imagined worse. Cole's earlier
