Edmund C. Coates (American, 1816-1871/2), "The Hudson River Below the Kosciusko Monument at West Point", oil on panel or board, signed and dated "E.C. Coates 1854" lower right, 20 in. x 24 in., in a finely carved giltwood frame of the period, with an ornamented oval giltwood liner, sight 17 1/2 in. x 21 1/2 in. E8000-12000 Note: This delicate and highly coloristic painting offers a wide view of the Hudson Highlands, focusing on the monument to the Polish artillery officer Thaddeus Kosciusko (or Kosciuszko, 1746-1817), a patriot hero of the Battle of Saratoga in the Revolutionary War (whose ashes are interred in the crypt of Wawel Cathedral in Krakow). The sculptural base and commemorative column at West Point were designed about 1820 by the Cadet son of the famous Anglo-American architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe (1764-1820), that is John H. B. Latrobe (1803-1891, appointed Cadet in 1818), who was obliged to resign from the Academy following his father's untimely death in New Orleans; the completed monument was inscribed by the Corps of Cadets in 1828. Coates, who lived and worked in Manhattan and Brooklyn from 1837 to 1871/2, borrowed the composition of this 1854 painting from a small steel engraving (about 5 in. x 7 in.) by G. K. Richardson, after a drawing of c. 1836 by William Henry Bartlett, which was published by Nathaniel Parker Willis in American Scenery; or, Land, Lake and River Illustrations of Transatlantic Nature (2 vols., London and New York, 1840). The print provided an almost exact prototype for this painting, except for the staffage: in the engraving, a Cadet and another young man are entertaining three young women on the foreground knoll, a brisk wind is bending the foliage to the right, while the sailing craft are fewer and conspicuously oversized. Coates's calmer, more measured, and slightly more distant view exemplifies his working method, which ( because of his preoccupations as an entrepreneurial art dealer in New York) was often based on just such sources among published prints: he painted a similarly-sized distant view of West Point from the opposite direction, "Crow's Nest from Bull Point"-a promontory directly behind the monument in this painting-based on another of the engravings in American Scenery (and see also his "Fort Putnam" in this same catalogue).