THE VILLAGE OF Catskill doesn’t seem particularly Catskilly. That’s partly because it’s located on the Hudson River, several miles to the east of the mountains that give the region its name. Still, you can see those mountains, a bumpy band of grayish lilac, from the house of Thomas Cole, where my husband, Caleb, and I found ourselves one recent afternoon.
The England-born Cole began painting this part of upstate New York in the 1820s. A founding member of the Hudson River School of artists, he’s best known for his romantic renderings of the waterway. But he frequently painted the Catskill mountains, which he portrayed as lush, unpeopled, and suffused with an almost otherworldly light.
Cole worked in the region around the time that it started to attract tourists, many of whom were drawn to the newly opened Catskill Mountain House, which was situated in a pine grove high up in what is now the Kaaterskill Wild Forest. The grand hotel was only a short distance from the edge of a cliff, providing guests with not only sublime views of the Hudson River but also the thrill of being just steps away from plummeting to their deaths. In one of Cole’s paintings, a figure sits at the foot of the precipice, sketching the hotel’s white Federalist façade above.
