Which American Romantic painter painted 'The Oxbow'?

The American Romantic painter who painted “The Oxbow” was Thomas Cole.

The full title is “View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm,” while “The Oxbow” is its familiar short name. Cole completed the oil painting in 1836, and it is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The scene shows the Connecticut River Valley divided between storm-darkened wilderness and a bright, cultivated landscape. This contrast has often been read as a meditation on nature, settlement, and America’s changing frontier. Cole constructed the panoramic view from two viewpoints on Mount Holyoke rather than copying one exact vista.

Cole is closely associated with the Hudson River School, a group of nineteenth-century American landscape painters. Asher Durand and Frederic Church were important figures in that movement, but neither painted this work; Albert Bierstadt belonged to a later generation of American landscape painters.