The Woodchopper, Lake Featherstonhaugh, 1826 oil on canvas 27 x 34 inches Fisher Gallery, USC, Gift of Mrs. Elizabeth Holmes Fisher

Thomas Cole is revered as the father of the Hudson River School. He was an early nineteenth-century American Romantic whose nationalistic and religious views of nature contributed greatly to the emergence of landscape painting as a respected movement in American art. Cole immigrated from England to Philadelphia in 1818 and later settled with his family in Ohio. In 1823, he studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. Two years later, in 1825, Cole moved to New York City and took his first sketching trip up the Hudson River to the Catskills, where he eventually settled. Cole, a founding member of the National Academy of Design, achieved great success and won the attention of many patrons. Among the important commissions Cole received was the five-part allegorical series The Course of Empire (1832-36).

The Woodchopper is one of a number of paintings that the English writer and speculator George William Featherstonhaugh commissioned from Cole in the winter of 1826. These paintings glorify Featherstonhaugh's estate near Duanesburg, New York. In the middle and far distances of The Woodchopper, Cole accurately depicted such features of the estate as the English-style country house, built in 1808, in the upper left. In the foreground, however, Cole's own artistic concerns dominate. The woodchopper clearing land for the estate's expansion reflects Cole's perception of the civilized landscape as a meeting place of nature's grandeur and the achievement of man's harmonious co-existence with the wilderness. Although clearing a single estate, Cole's woodchopper is a heroic figure actively participating in the development of the frontier. By the mid-nineteenth century the figure of the woodchopper, as well as the axe and the tree stump, became a popular symbol of the duality between the progress of civilization and the destruction of the wilderness in American landscape painting.