Thomas Cole's View of Fort Putnam

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 2004 by Elise Effmann

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A number of technical features substantiate the identification of the painting as a very early landscape by Cole. The handling of the paint, with its impasto highlights, has the freeness and immediacy of his earliest work, before he took a more methodical and restrained approach toward brushwork. This lively handling of paint is even apparent in the ground layer, which was vigorously applied with a wide brush. It has been noted that this same treatment of the ground is used in Lake with Dead Trees (Catskill), but by 1827 Cole had abandoned the brush in favor of painting in the ground with a knife. (11) Infrared reflectography of View of Fort Putnam reveals loosely drawn looping pencil strokes defining the landscape and clouds, which resemble the style of his outdoor sketches. Finally, the dimensions of View of Fort Putnam are almost exactly the same as those of Lake with Dead Trees (Catskill). (12)

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In the attempt to identify the location of the scene, two compositional elements stood out: the stone structure and the man's attire. The large building occupies the entire crest of the hill, much like a European castle, yet the landscape is distinctively American in character: The man is dressed in the fashion of the late eighteenth century, adding a touch of nostalgia to the figure. When these elements are reviewed alongside a list of documented paintings by Cole in the 1820s, the only possible candidate is View of Fort Putnam. (13)

Early documentary references to the painting support the identification of the subject as Fort Putnam. Cole kept a log of sketches made on his trip during the summer of 1825 and referred to number eight as "a View of the Ruins of Fort Putnam from the south," made between his renderings of Cold Spring from West Point and a view of the river to the north from Fort Putnam. Following this identification of the scene, he wrote that there was "a very fine effect to be produced by shadowing the mountain to the left by a cloud[,] the large tree(s) receiving the light." (14) The review of the American Academy's annual exhibition cited earlier noted that one of Cole's pictures "is a distant view of Fort Putnam, in which the sun, shining through broken clouds, illuminates the distant hill and foreground, while the middle ground is shadowed." (15) These descriptions correspond precisely with the composition and light in View of Fort Putnam.

With the introduction of commercial steamboat travel up the Hudson River in 1807, its valley became a tourist destination for travelers keen on seeing the American landscape. (16) Renowned for its scenic vistas and Revolutionary War history, West Point and its surroundings, fifty miles north of New York City, was one of the major stops on the boat line. Built in 1778, Fort Putnam was positioned on a hilltop overlooking West Point to protect the dramatic bend of the river that gave the area its name (Fig. 1). It was a picturesque ruin by 1825, frequently visited by tourists for the splendid view it afforded of the Hudson Highlands. The fort appears in the background of numerous prints and drawings of West Point made during the first half of the nineteenth century (see Pl. IV). Artists also rendered the Hudson Highlands from the fort, including the fallen stones of the structure in the foreground of their pictures (see Fig. 2). Cole sketched his view from the south looking north on a hill near the present-day West Point Museum; the Hudson River snakes between Bull Hill in the distance on the east side and the three hills of West Point that occupy the middle ground of the painting. (17) The road in the painting, now paved, is the West Point Highway, which leads onto the campus of the military academy. When visiting the site today it is clear that, although Cole initially worked from nature, he adapted the landscape to suit his pictorial scheme. The rounded height of the central hill has been exaggerated to focus attention on Fort Putnam, and the view has been telescoped to incorporate the more intimate pastoral foreground scene.