Lake with Dead Trees (Catskill)

Lake with Dead Trees (Catskill) is an oil painting on canvas by Thomas Cole, painted in 1825 and now in the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, Ohio (1904.1183). It measures 68.6 by 85.7 cm and is signed T Cole near the bottom.

The picture belongs to the small group of landscapes with which Cole's career took off and which are counted among the beginnings of the Hudson River School. In late summer 1825, with support from the New York merchant George Washington Bruen, the 24-year-old artist travelled by steamboat up the Hudson, stopping at West Point and Catskill, and filled sketchbooks along the way. A pencil drawing from that trip inscribed Lake of Dead Trees, now in the Detroit Institute of Arts, lays out the general composition with notes on light and colour.

In the painting Cole heightened the wildness of the scene. Bleached, splintered trunks rise in the left foreground and fallen timber lies along the shore, while two deer bound away below and the sun sets in the right distance behind a wooded lake and a mountain peak. The dead trees grow smaller towards the right, where living forest takes over. The museum notes that these details have prompted literary, religious and other symbolic readings and look ahead to Cole's later allegorical landscapes. One viewer in 1825 remarked that the deer might easily have been left out.

In late October or early November 1825 the canvas was shown with other new Cole landscapes at William Coleman's shop in New York, priced at 25 dollars. John Trumbull, president of the American Academy of Fine Arts, bought one and alerted William Dunlap, who bought this picture, and Asher B. Durand, who bought another. The discovery quickly became legend and launched Cole's career. Charles F. Olney gave the painting to Oberlin College in 1904.