Landscape with Figures: A Scene from "The Last of the Mohicans"

Thomas Cole’s Landscape with Figures: A Scene from "The Last of the Mohicans" presents a vista of a densely forested, mountainous landscape seen from an elevated perspective. Rocky outcroppings, blasted trees, a waterfall, and smoke rising from a distant forest fire, as well as a tumultuous cloudscape, all contribute to the wildness of the prospect. The drama of nature seems both to dwarf and to complement the dramatic gestures of several diminutive figures scattered across the near ground yet inaccessible from the viewer’s standpoint. Although painted on a relatively small panel, the scene is larger than life in its romantic turmoil and emotional intensity.

The painting was one of two commissioned in 1826 by James Alexander Stevens of Hoboken, New Jersey. They were part of a series of twelve mahogany panels created to decorate the main cabin of Stevens's Hudson River steamboat the Albany. For the project, Cole was inspired by newly published novel The Last of the Mohicans, the second of the popular Leatherstocking Tales by James Fenimore Cooper. Landscape with Figures was the first of four works that the artist based on Cooper's text. Set during the French and Indian War (1755–63), the novel blends historical fact and romantic fiction as it recounts the efforts of sisters Alice and Cora Munro to join their father, a British commander, at Fort William Henry near Lake Champlain. Guided through the wilderness by Uncas (the last of the Mohicans), the frontiersman Hawkeye, and Major Duncan Heyward, their progress is thwarted by Magua, leader of a group of Hurons allied with the French against the British. Cole’s painting depicts the story’s climactic scene. On the far left, Heyward motions with his outstretched arm toward the center of the image. There Hawkeye aims his rifle at Magua, who hangs from the edge of a cliff. The white-clad Cora, having been kidnapped and brutalized by Magua, lies dying at Hawkeye's feet next to Uncas, who is killed while trying to save her.

In a young republic in which the fine arts were still widely regarded as either superfluous or a dangerously corrupting luxury, Cole saw the advantages of associating his painted landscape with a much-loved work of contemporary literature. Moreover, Cooper’s novels helped legitimize not only events from recent American history but the American wilderness as a vehicle for distinctly national cultural expression. In his earliest finished landscape paintings, produced only the year before he painted Landscape with Figures, Cole too endeavored to demonstrate that American nature, presented in all its untouched native wildness, could be the subject of high art.

While working on the painting, Cole visited the settings of Cooper's novel, including Lake George and Fort Ticonderoga, but his interpretation transcends topographical reportage. Landscape with Figures shares Cooper’s epic vision of the American experience in which the virtues of the "noble savage" and the uncouth pioneer—who, paradoxically, will save the "civilized" English colonists—are linked to the pristine landscape. In Cole’s interpretation, the grandeur of the wilderness overwhelms the narrative, reminding the viewer that there are greater forces in the universe than human conflict and desire.

The Gallery at Earle's, James Earle's frame shop, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1827.

Exhibition of the Steamboat Albany Collection, main cabin steamboat, Albany, New York, April 1827–c.1843/1844.

Annual art exhibition (1858–1862), sponsored by the Troy Young Men's Association, Troy, New York, 1858 (as ); 1859 (as Death of Uncas).

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America: Painting a Nation,  Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago, Illinois, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia (organizers). Venue: Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, November 9, 2013–February 8, 2014. [exh. cat]

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Picturing the Americas: Landscape Painting from Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic, Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago, Illinois, in partnership with the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada and  Pinacoteca de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil (organizers). Venues: Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada, June 20–September 7, 2015; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, November 6, 2015–January 18, 2016, Pinacoteca de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil, February 27–May 29, 2016. [exh. cat.]

Continental Shift: Nineteenth Century American and Australian Landscape Painting, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, Australia and Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago, Illinois (organizers). Venue: Art Gallery of Western Australia, July 30, 2016–February 5, 2017. [exh. cat.]

Not as the Songs of other Lands: 19th century Australian and American Landscape Painting, Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne, Australia and Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago, Illinois (organizers). Venue: Ian Potter Museum of Art, March 14–June 11, 2017.

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