James Fenimore Cooper

Date1842

MediumOil on canvas

DimensionsSight: 22 3/8 × 18 3/4 in. (56.8 × 47.6 cm)

Object numberN0004.2017(10)

Credit LineCollection of the Fenimore Art Museum. Gift of Dr. Henry F. C. Weil

Photograph by Richard Walker

Label TextThe woods were a very special place to Cooper, whose boyhood was spent in the frontier village of Cooperstown, on Lake Otsego. Although he attended Yale University, served in the merchant marine, and lived in Westchester County as well as New York City, he never forgot and always treasured his boyhood in the wilderness - a wilderness which was even then disappearing through the efforts of developers like his own father, the founder of Cooperstown, and others less scrupulous and far less careful. Even by 1802, when Cooper left for Yale at the age of thirteen, the wilderness was vanishing. It was Cooper's chosen task to write of this transitional phase in American life and to warn men that while "progress" is surely inevitable and may be desirable, much will be lost and, if we are not careful, perhaps everything.

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