Stylistic Comparison of \"The Oxbow\"

Stylistic Comparison of "The Oxbow" and "Starry Night"

Both Thomas Cole's American Realistic oil painting of the "The Oxbow" (1836) (now displayed in the Metropolitan Museum of New York City) and Vincent Van Gough's 1889 "Starry Night" (also part of the same museum's permanent collection) are pictorial representations of landscapes. However, Van Gough's pastoral rendition of the open sky at night strikes the viewer immediately, despite the image's familiarity, as a surreal, Post-Impressionistic swirl of almost hyperbolic intensity of color. "Although the features are exaggerated, this is a scene we can all relate to, and also one that most individuals feel comfortable and at ease with. This sky keeps the viewer's eyes moving about the painting, following the curves and creating a visual dot to dot with the stars. This movement keeps the onlooker involved in the painting while the other factors take hold" ("Vincent van Gogh: The Starry Nights," Van Gough Gallery. 2007). It functions more as a representation of the artist's inner life than an accurate depiction of nature. In contrast, although Cole's portrait of an oxbow in a river is similarly sepia in tones, and shows how the artist perceives an apparently, deceptively, tranquil natural phenomenon, Cole's work is far more realistic in its rendering of the details of the scene.

This is not to say that Cole's work is lacking an explicit point-of-view. "Cole convey[s] the visual representation of the struggle between wilderness and civilization... The dramatic storm clouds over the wilderness speak of the uncontrolled power of nature, but also of the sublimity of this power," when it is disciplined by the force of human hands for the purposes of productivity (Johns, 1996). Van Gough's carving of a point-of-view into the landscape is seen in his use of the night sky to show the turmoil of his soul, and the chaotic refusal of the stars to obey any coherent order. But Cole's confident view in the value of order is seen as he: "shows no remorse for the recession of the wilderness from the scene. The soft greens and yellows and the gentle rolling landscape of the farms suggest that the pastoral civilization that replaces the wilderness is as beautiful in its order as nature is in its sublimity" (Johns, 1996) Nature is beautiful in both works but Cole believes nature is only beautiful when it enhances human life in a practical fashion, and in Cole's "tension between wilderness and garden, savagery and civilization," unlike Van Gough's, civilization is the rightful victor (Johns, 1996).

The Oxbow" shows the confidence of Americans of the period in technology and progress, as embodied in the Industrial Revolution, and also the ability of Americans to discipline the wilderness through agriculture, rail roads, and other emerging technologies of the day. Van Gough's landscape shows the European shift in painting from outward depictions of heroic subjects with unerring detailed accuracy to a concern with how the landscape can reveal impressions of the artist's own unique vision. However, one Cole scholar has suggested: "in the lazy turn of the great oxbow -- echoed by the circling birds at the edge of the storm -- we can make out the shape of a question mark: where is all this headed," in short that even in this American confidence there is tension and doubt (Johns, 1996).