The Hunter's Return (NJ13)


            During our trip to the Carter Museum, we saw a variety of paintings emphasizing different aspects of nature and people’s role within it.  As I circled around the artwork, I kept returning to one of Thomas Cole’s sizable painting of a mountainous countryside.  His work, titled “The Hunter’s Return” and completed in 1845, depicts a family performing duties around a home.  The background portrays spanning skies and massive mountains that tower over the family and the cabin.  Rugged mountainside implicitly demonstrates the power of the surrounding environment.  The people and their activities occupy only a slight proportion of the canvas.  In most of Cole’s work, the juxtaposition of vast natural landscape and tiny humans emphasizes the size of the environment.
            I am particularly fond of the lighting and colors in the center of the painting.  While the sun cannot be seen, it appears late in the afternoon because warm colors wash over the people.  The warm lighting illuminates the colorful trees that supply a sense of comfort.  In the darker foreground, chopped trees and destruction, likely necessary for easy living of the family, subtly suggest the effects of human comfort on nature.  I believe we underestimate the effect we play in our environment and struggle to understand the scarcity of resources.
            In passing, I mentioned to one of the workers at the Carter Museum that I liked this painting.  He nodded in agreement before bitterly informing me that people cannot keep their hands off the canvas, so the museum staff will likely have to remove the painting to preserve it.  In a twisted way, that was fitting.  Just as Cole depicted a family who touched their surroundings to affect it so others will never see what they saw, museum viewers are touching Cole’s painting and therefore causing the museum to put the artwork away so others will not see its magnificence.

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