BETSY BROUN: Kay Larsen, art critic for New York Magazine, wrote about this 1866 painting of “Storm King on the Hudson” by Samuel Colman. She said it “marks the moment when paradise was invaded by men of commerce. Painters were left with a problem: what to do about the tanning factories, sawmills, paper factories, and the other small businesses that started to overtake the epic waterfalls and elegant forests along the Hudson.” The debates we still have today about competing claims of preservation and development were already major issues in the mid-nineteenth century. Samuel Colman gave equal time to both sides of the discussion by dividing his painting neatly into halves.

The protagonist of the right half is the mountain that was known to many as “Butter Hill” because of its soft, rounded shape. Today, we call it “Storm King Mountain”, a tribute to the frequent dark clouds that shroud its top. Colman gives nearly a third of the height of his canvas to these impressive clouds. Below the mountain is a vision of olden days, just passing into history about the time of the Civil War. Small boats hug the shore, and in the foreground, three men fish with nets. It’s clearly a family or local enterprise.

The left half represents the industrialized future. Giant commercial barges are linked together, their huge paddle wheels turned by coal-generated steam. Smoke stacks are at the center of this half of the composition, a threatening industrial parallel to the dark clouds over Storm King Mountain. The barges seem to bare down menacingly on the small fishing craft.

The two halves, we realize, are tenuously linked underwater by the fragile nets of the fishermen. It is as if Colman already knew that the uneasy coexistence of these two ways of life in his own present would soon be severed into two very different worlds: past and future. By carefully arranging his picture as a double square, Colman keeps the debate about industry and nature in balance. Are the barges symbols of promise and progress? Or are they destroyers?