Thomas Cole climbed Mt. Holyoke in Hadley, Massachusetts, in 1833 and made a sketch of the oxbow curve in the Connecticut River to the southwest. He used the sketch and his field notes three years later when creating his iconic oil painting of the Oxbow. It embodied his artistic techniques and his philosophy of man's role in nature, thereby epitomizing the Hudson River School of art. It is hard to imagine when driving across the Oxbow today on Interstate 91 in Northampton that this is the ...