Thomas Cole's View of Fort Putnam

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 2004 by Elise Effmann

Choosing Fort Putnam for one of his debut paintings allowed Cole to display his skill at rendering a landscape in a scene endowed with historical meaning. Control of the fort and surrounding area was of great strategic importance to the defense of New York and ultimately to the success of the American cause in the Revolution. The fort assumed greater significance when the commander at West Point, Benedict Arnold (1741-1801), treasonously plotted to give it to the British in 1780, and Major John Andre (1751-1780), a chief conspirator on the English side, was captured and executed. The visually sublime possibilities as well as the historical associations of the site are well-summarized in an excerpt from a book of engravings principally by Durand entitled The American Landscape (1830), which describes Fort Putnam as follows:

It is a feature almost unique in American scenery, reminding the
traveler of the romantic ruined towers of defence in the gorges of the
Pyrenees, or the feudal castles which still frown from the rocky banks
of the Rhine.... These ruins are rich with the most hallowed
associations; for they are fraught with recollections of heroism,
liberty, and virtue.... As we muse over this magnificent scene of great
events, the imagination insensibly kindles, and the plain below, and the
forts, and rocks, become peopled again with the soldiers and chiefs of
the revolution.... Amid the ruins of Fort Putnam, the patriot may find
materials to animate him with fresh hopes for his country's future
welfare, as well as to recall the noblest recollections of her past
history. (18)

These were precisely the allusions and sentiments that Cole hoped to evoke in View of Fort Putnam, and it is certain that they were not lost on an educated audience.

The role of Durand adds another layer to the story of Cole's painting. Five years Cole's senior, Durand had only recently achieved a name for himself with his engraving of Trumbull's Declaration of Independence when he purchased View of Fort Putnam in 1825. The two young artists developed a strong friendship, and it was partially through Cole's encouragement that Durand ended his career as an engraver and portraitist at the age of forty in favor of trying his hand at landscape painting. Durand made two extended sketching trips with Cole in 1837 and 1839 and launched his second artistic career with nine landscapes in an exhibition at the National Academy of Design in New York City in 1838. Durand is often said to have assumed the role of the foremost landscape painter in the United States after Cole's unexpected death in 1848.

The acquisition of View of Fort Putnam by the Philadelphia Museum of Art comes at an auspicious moment for the collection, because Cole's Landscape, the Seat of Mr. Featherstonhaugh in the Distance (Pl. V), painted in early 1826, has also recently been promised as a gift to the museum by an anonymous donor. (19) George William Featherstonhaugh, (20) a geologist and entrepreneur, probably became acquainted with Cole through Trumbull, and may have seen Cole's first three paintings exhibited at the American Academy. Unfortunately, Cole's relationship with his new benefactor was not a happy one, as articulated by the clergyman and writer Louis Legrand Noble (1813-1882) who, in his biography of Cole, referred to Featherstonhaugh as a "heartless employer" and called Cole "the Dupe of an unworthy Patron." (21) Cole himself, in a letter to Trumbull in February 1826, expressed his dissatisfaction with the commission to paint several views of Featherstonhaugh's upstate Duanesburg estate: