View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow

Cole divided this panoramic landscape into contrasting zones of wild nature and cultivated farmland, with the artist himself visible as a tiny figure beneath a storm cloud. The painting reflects on the tension between the American wilderness and expanding settlement, a central theme of the Hudson River School.
The work is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession 08.228), gift of Mrs. Russell Sage, 1908.