The painting's full title is View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm. Its more common name comes from the great loop of the Connecticut River below.

Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School of American landscape painters, split the scene in two: on the left, wild forest and a retreating thunderstorm; on the right, calm, sunlit farmland. Wilderness versus civilisation — a question that obsessed young America.

Look for the painter himself, tiny, at his easel in the middle foreground, looking out at us. And on the far hillside, some scholars have read the clearings as Hebrew letters spelling "Noah" — which, viewed upside down from the sky, could read as Shaddai, "the Almighty". Whether Cole intended it is still debated.