This early work finds a single figure, tiny in comparison with the vast landscape unfolding around him, wandering among craggy rocks.
Sunlight bathes the wanderer.
His path seems shaped and worn by wind and water, rather than by commerce. A dramatically twisted, storm-ruined tree points upward, toward trees blown by a wind that rushes thin clouds across the sky. The mountains themselves, a fairly accurate depiction of the softly eroded shapes of the Catskills, rise and fall for miles toward a distant horizon. The spirit that imbues this image of a lone traveler amid a landscape awesome in scale is not, of course, topographical. A religious man, Cole's sensibility as an artist was shaped by a tradition that was more than a century old by 1801, the year of his birth.