Which American landscape painter is known for 'The Oxbow'?

Thomas Cole is the American landscape painter known for The Oxbow.

The Oxbow is the common name for View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm, painted in 1836. It shows the Connecticut River Valley from Mount Holyoke, with a dramatic storm clearing over the landscape. Cole divided the scene between a dark, tangled wilderness on the left and a bright, cultivated countryside on the right.

That contrast has encouraged interpretations involving wilderness and settlement, nature and civilization, or the changing American landscape. Cole was a founder of the Hudson River School, a movement known for expansive, highly dramatic views of the American wilderness. The painting is not a strictly literal transcription of the view: Cole combined two separate observations to create its unusually broad panorama.

Small details reward close inspection. Logging scars on the distant hillside appear to form Hebrew-like letters, though their meaning remains debated. The painting entered the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1908 and remains one of the defining works of nineteenth-century American landscape painting.