Genesee Scenery (Mountain Landscape with Waterfall)

Genesee Scenery, also called Mountain Landscape with Waterfall, is an oil painting on canvas by Thomas Cole, signed and dated T. Cole 1847 at the lower left and now in the RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island (38.054). It measures 130.8 by 99.7 cm.

The view shows the gorge of the Genesee River, which flows north through western New York, in the area now known as Letchworth Park. Cole visited the gorge in 1841 as the guest of the engineer Elisha Johnson, who had built Hornby Lodge, a rustic octagonal log house on a high cliff above the Middle Falls. On that trip Cole also painted Portage Falls on the Genesee for William Seward, which still hangs in Seward's house in Auburn. According to WNY Heritage, the RISD picture represents the view from Hornby Lodge and was worked up years later from a smaller painting made on the spot, now in the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester. The RISD Museum notes that Cole was the first artist to depict this stretch of the river.

Painted the year before his death, the canvas belongs to a late phase in which, as the museum puts it, Cole's earlier taste for dramatic effects gave way to a wish to show nature in repose. He wrote that the highest sublime lies in the pure blue sky, where the illimitable is found. Here a broad sky of piled white clouds takes up the upper third, above a sunlit meadow, wooded hills and a small house. Below, the eye drops into the shadowed gorge, where a waterfall pours past a mill and under a wooden footbridge between sheer rock walls.

The museum explains that Cole built this composite viewpoint, high above the footbridge and mill, by combining carefully drawn sketches, and relied on precise studies of trees and colour notes on rust-stained minerals to keep the details truthful.