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(lively piano music)
>> Dr. Steven Zucker: We're at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
and we're looking at one of the great paintings
from the early Hudson River School, Thomas Cole, "The Oxbow."
>> Dr. Beth Harris: And it's a very large landscape looking down
over a bend in the Connecticut River.
>> Dr. Zucker: In Northampton, Massachusetts.
>> Dr. Harris: And we have this canvas that's divided in two, really,
one with the sun emerging.
It looks like a storm is passing ...
>> Dr. Zucker: That's right.
>> Dr. Zucker: On the left, there is this incredible kind of ...
>> Dr. Harris: Dramatic sky with rain ...
>> Dr. Zucker: And actually, you can almost make out a bit of lightning
out in the extreme left.
>> Dr. Harris: And there is that cracked branch in the foreground.
>> Dr. Zucker: The blasted bow, right?
>> Dr. Zucker: The blasted tree.
And in fact, this painting is often seen in American art
as a wonderful expression of the two ways that landscape were understood,
as the pastoral tradition on the right
and as the sublime expression on the left.
>> Dr. Harris: Right.
Cole himself, up in the foreground, shown ...
>> Dr. Zucker: Looking back at us.
>> Dr. Harris: Looking back at us,
and he is painting this beautiful American landscape,
and of course, that's what America had.
Europe had ruins and churches and great monuments and history,
but America had these fabulously beautiful untouched landscapes, although ...
>> Dr. Zucker: Which were really made noble and made into a mythology.
>> Dr. Harris: And also feed into ideas of manifest destiny and ...
>> Dr. Zucker: That's right, of America's divine promise.
>> Dr. Harris: Right.
Here, I think we have some signs of man in the landscape,
>>Dr. Zucker: So it's complicated.
>> Dr. Harris: It is kind of complicated.
of the American Industrial Revolution.
>> Dr. Harris: Right.
>> Dr. Zucker: And you're right, you can see,
especially on the right side, with ...
>> Dr. Harris: Division of land into farm land into ...
>> Dr. Zucker: The exhaust of houses or perhaps ...
>> Dr. Harris: And chimneys.
>> Dr. Zucker: That's right.
And so this is a settled area.
There's a question about which is the direction of America.
>> Dr. Harris: Right.
>> Dr. Zucker: Yeah.
I think it's ...
>> Dr. Harris: This sort of growth of man settling landscape
>> Dr. Zucker: But does that destroy,
in a sense, America's greatness?
Does it destroy the wildness and the pristine beauty
and sublime expression of God's presence?
Because remember, if you look at the left side of the canvas,
with all of the power of that thunderstorm,
of that blasted tree, of the wildness,
this was understood in the 19th century
really as an expression of God's immediate presence
and is God being somehow erased in some way.
>> Dr. Harris: Or is the settlement of America, of the United States,
and man settling the land, is this part of God's plan for us?
>> Dr. Zucker: And that really is the central question
in the first half of the 19th century in America.
It really speaks to this very complex relationship
that exists between these new Americans and their world,
at their landscape.
>> Dr. Harris: Yup.
(lively piano music)