THE CATSKILL GEOLOGISTS BY PROFESSORS ROBERT AND JOHANNA TITUS - The Mills Mansion 4 The Hudson River School Visits

CATSKILL -  We belong to a facebook page devoted to the Hudson River School of Art (“The Hudson River School of Painters”). That site provides us with the images of a lot of HRS paintings, including many we have never seen before. Recently we spotted the one that you can see in our first illustration. This post was essentially an advertisement from an eastern Pennsylvanian art gallery. The painting was for sale. It was described as being by an artist named George Cope and done in 1870. The location was described as being unknown, but probably from along the shore of an eastern Pennsylvanian river. We love finding paintings with “unknown” locations; it challenges us to search out where the work had actually been done. This one did not take long. We had been, at the time, doing research for our recent columns about the Mills Mansion. We both agreed that this view had been sketched along the shore of the Hudson at the south end of Mills Mansion property. We just needed to go and get a picture. That’s our second illustration.                                

   That’s something called Dinsmore Point on the left and the western shore of the Hudson is to the right. The trees of Dinsmore Point today thickly populate the shoreline; they were hardly even there back then, but trees do grow a lot in 150 years, don’t they? The painting and today’s images are, all in all, pretty good matches.

    But this is supposed to be a geology column; isn’t it? So, where’s the geology? Let’s start in the left foreground. The painting shows a small peninsula sticking out into the Hudson. That’s not there today. Was it a fictional feature, painted by George Cope just to make a better image? Artists are commonly known to do just that; after all, this is art, not photography. Or did that peninsula actually exist there in 1870? That should be hard to prove, shouldn’t it?  But we went down there and looked. We did find where today a small creek empties into the river right there. In 1870 that creek might well have deposited those sediments. There are any number of reasons why that creek may well have carried more sediment back then. Perhaps someone had plowed a nearby field for agriculture. The creek would have had an easy time picking up a lot of that freshly plowed earth and bringing it into the Hudson. If so, then there may well have been a peninsula there in1870.

   We went there and found that Dinsmore Point is composed of a black sedimentary rock called the Normanskill Black Shale. That closely matches what Cope painted in 1870. But why is the shoreline slope so steep? We wrote about this in our recent book “The Hudson Valley School of Art and its Ice Age origins.” We speculated that it was the Hudson Valley glacier that sheared off the rock here and produced that cliff-like slope.

   Once again, we found that what should be a sharp boundary between art and geology is very blurred. What we are arguing is that you really need to know a lot of geology, especially ice age geology, to truly understand landscape art. Perhaps we can get really pretentious and say that we are founding (!) a new field of art - “landscape art geology.” 

   Contact the authors at randjtitus@prodigy.net. Join their facebook page “The Catskill Geologist.” Read their blogs at “thecatskillgeologist.com.”