Thomas Cole visited Niagara Falls in May 1829, composing this romanticized, autumnal scene the following year. Portraying the grandeur of the American landscape, the artist omitted the factories, scenic overlooks, and hotels that populated the area in the early 19th century. Cole expressed concern about the environmental impact of voracious industrialism, but at the same time his painting erased the human devastation wrought by colonialism and conquest in the region, which encompassed Attiwonderonk, Haudenosaunee, and Wenrohronon lands. The two Native American figures at center, combined with the falls, identify the setting as North America, but their diminished presence in scale and number reinforces the false idea of the “vanishing Indian” and is meant to signal impending transformation rather than acknowledge their stolen sovereignty.
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Julia D. Sophronia Snow, “Delineators of the Adams–Jackson American Views,” Antiques (November 1936): 214–19.
Louis Legrand Noble, The Life and Works of Thomas Cole (Belknap Press, 1964).
Howard S. Merritt, “A Wild Scene, Genesis of a Painting: Appendix I: Correspondence between Thomas Cole and Robert Gilmor, Jr.” Baltimore Museum of Art Annual 2 (1967): 41–81.
Henry H. Glassie, “Thomas Cole and Niagara Falls,” New–York Historical Quarterly 58, 2 (April 1974): 89–111.
“Reevaluation of a Thomas Cole Painting,” Museum Studies 8 (1973): 96–108.
Matthew Baigell, Thomas Cole (Watson–Guptill Publications, 1981).
J. Bard McNulty, ed., The Correspondence of Thomas Cole and Daniel Wadsworth (Hartford: Connecticut Historical Society, 1983).
Elizabeth McKinsey, Niagara Falls: Icon of the American Sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
Ellwood Parry III, The Art of Thomas Cole: Ambition and Imagination (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1988).
Earl A. Powell, Thomas Cole (New York: Harry N. Abrams Publishers, 1990).
Angela Miller, The Empire of the Eye (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993).
Thomas Cole: Drawn to Nature, exh. cat., (Albany: Albany Institute of History and Art, 1993).
William H. Truettner and Alan Wallach, eds., Thomas Cole: Landscape into History (Washington, DC: National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1994), ill.
Judith A. Barter, et al., American Arts at The Art Institute of Chicago: From Colonial Times to World War I (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1998).
Stephanie Pratt et al., “George Catlin: American Indian Portraits,” exh. cat. (Washington, DC: National Portrait Gallery/National Portrait Gallery Company, 2013).
Rachel Bohan, “Jacob Kassay: No Goal,” (The Power Station/Dallas, 2014), (ill.).
Paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago, Highlights of the Collection (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago/Yale University Press, 2017), 50.
Milwaukee Art Institute, Nineteenth Century American Masters, Feb. 20–Mar. 28, 1948, cat. 12.
Hartford, Wadsworth Atheneum, Thomas Cole 1801–1848: One Hundred Years Later, Nov. 12, 1948–Jan. 2, 1949, cat. 155, as Niagara Falls; New York City, Whitney Museum of American Art, Jan. 8–30, 1949.
Arts Club of Chicago, The American Landscape, Nov. 14–Dec. 29, 1973, cat. 4.
Washington, DC, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Niagara: Two Centuries of Changing Attitudes, 1697–1901, Sept. 21–Nov. 24, 1985; Buffalo, NY, Knox Art Gallery, July 13–Sept. 1, 1985; Corcoran Gallery of Art, New–York Historical Society, Jan. 22–Apr. 27, 1986.
New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings, Jan. 30–May 13, 2018, cat. 19 ; London, The National Gallery, June 11–Oct. 7, 2018.
Frank Sabin, London, by 1936; M. Knoedler, London, 1937; Mrs. Edith Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, London, by 1946; to the Art Institute of Chicago, 1946.
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