One of the most glorious depictions of the Catskill landscape is 200 years old this year. Kaaterskill Falls on the Catskill Mountains, Taken Under the Cavern is a painting by Irish-American artist William Guy Wall. As one of the contemporaries of Thomas Cole, Wall was inspired by the romantic landscapes that made Cole so prolific in the early to mid 19th century. Wall studied under Thomas Cole who founded the Hudson River School. Both artists are known for their dramatic scenes of northeast nature on canvas.
Their oil paintings brought a sense of grandeur back towards the great outdoors when the industrial revolution was taking shape in the big cities. Catherine Whitney is the Director of Curatorial affairs at the Honolulu Museum of Art, where Wall’s painting of Kaaterskill Falls has been housed since 1969. Whitney ties the painting to environmentalism and the idea of being romantic about what the earth bestowed upon settlers and what was taken from native americans, “ With our environmental crises right now, I think these works have renewed relevance to us,” said Whitney.
“Although if they were painted in this exact way right now, they might have been under different circumstances and impulses.” Wall’s painting shows the glory that is autumn in the Catskills. Amber colored leaves with hints of bright yellow fading into brown. The scene also features white people, which would appear to be tourists discovering the area as a wealthy person’s hideaway, “ And so at this time in the 19th century, not everybody could travel to these either exotic sites or far away sites like in Hawaii, if they were based in New York,” Whitney explained.
“This idea of wonder and exploration is magical, places to visit even visually or in the imagination were a lot of what these landscapes were about, and the finest of these paintings still do that.”
Painting : Kaaterskill Falls is an 1826 oil-on-canvas painting by British-American painter Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School