CATSKILL, NY.- The Thomas Cole National Historic Site announced today that a new exhibition – On Trees: Georgia O’Keeffe and Thomas Cole – opened on June 21, 2025. The exhibition explores how Thomas Cole (1801-1848) depicted trees in the year of his transformational first visit to Catskill, NY (1825) and how Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) did so in her pivotal first visit to New Mexico a century later (1929).


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The exhibition has been built around two, stunning, American landscape oil paintings that have never been displayed together before:

• “Hunters in a Landscape” by Thomas Cole dates to c. 1825, the year of his first visit to Catskill, a trip that changed the course of American art. It is in the permanent collection of the Thomas Cole National Historic Site; a gift of Dr. Susan Gates Austin Warner, whose late husband Jack Warner was a visionary collector of American art.


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• “Dead Tree Bear Lake Taos” by Georgia O’Keeffe dates to 1929, when she visited New Mexico for the first time. O’Keeffe’s trip, like Cole’s, would have a transformational effect on her artistic practice. The painting is on loan from Art Bridges.

These paintings reflect how the anthropomorphic qualities of trees captured the attention and creativity of two iconic painters at the time of their first visits to the landscapes that would define their work thereafter – and have a lasting impact on American art. Additional paintings and drawings by Cole will augment the show’s exploration.

“These works of Thomas Cole and Georgia O’Keeffe have not previously been presented together, but there are profound connections that this exhibition reveals,” said Kate Menconeri, Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, Contemporary Art, and Fellowship at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site. “First, the artists, working about a century apart, share a fascination for trees and animate them with rich allegorical meanings; second, they both depicted trees during their first visits to areas of the country that would go on to shape, not only their careers, but American art as we experience it today. This intersection is eye-opening, with the work of each artist informing the experience of viewing the work of the other.”

"The link between Thomas Cole and Georgia O'Keeffe is indirect but important," notes the interdisciplinary scholar H. Daniel Peck, the John Guy Vassar Professor Emeritus of English at Vassar College," who has published on both figures. "While O'Keeffe is mainly identified with twentieth-century modernism, both European and American, her work also reflects American nineteenth-century thought regarding nature's organic forms. Cole's art embodied such thought, and the trees in the two exhibited works point to an intriguing relationship between his ideas about nature and those of O'Keeffe."

The exhibition is being presented in conjunction with COLE 200, this year’s 200th Anniversary celebration of Cole’s first trip to Catskill, NY, in 1825. The paintings that Thomas Cole made of the Hudson River Valley and Catskill Mountains launched not only his career, but the major art movement of the United States known as the Hudson River School of American landscape painting.

Reflecting on that trip, Tim Barringer, Yale University’s Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art, says, “Thomas Cole’s first visit to Catskill is an event whose significance resonates through the history of American art to the present day.” Betsy Kornhauser, Curator Emerita at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, states, “When Cole took his first trip up the Hudson River in 1825 and took sketches of the Catskill region, his early wilderness scenes launched a new paradigm for American art.” Franklin Kelly, Senior Curator and Christiane Ellis Valone Curator of American Paintings at the National Gallery of Art, says, “If landscape painting in America can be said to have a ‘big bang’ moment, that was surely it.”

“Seeing the work of Thomas Cole and Georgia O’Keeffe presented together in this way is extraordinary,” said Maura O’Shea, Executive Director of the Thomas Cole National Historic Site. “One can almost imagine the conversation that they might have had, if they had lived at the same time, and how much they would have found in common around their life-long fascination with nature.”