Edmund C. Coates (American, 1816-1871/2), "View of the Hudson Highlands from Fort Putnam, above West Point, NY", shortly after 1840 oil on canvas, 20 1/8 in. x 24 in., in a period giltwood frame. E8000-12000 Provenance: Christie's, New York, December 3, 1996, Lot 41; corporate collection of Iroquois Brands, Greenwich, CT. Note: This exceptionally fine and characteristic painting represents Coates at his best, working with the full chromatic and expressive repertory of his ablest contemporaries in the Hudson River School of early American landscape painters. His brilliantly sun-drenched view embraces Crow's Nest and Storm King Mountain in sharply overlapping perspective on the left, rising above Washington Valley in the foreground; in the left distance, the northern reach of the Hudson passes the narrows below Breakneck Ridge, while at center Mount Taurus (Bull Hill) rises dramatically over Constitution Island, and the east- bank village of Cold Spring. In the right foreground, towering over the promontory of "West Point" itself, are the massive walls of Fort Putnam, constructed in 1778-1779 to a plan of Thaddeus Kosciusko, by Col. Rufus Putnam and the 5th Massachusetts Militia Regiment, atop the steep rocky outcrop of Crown Hill, commanding the entire plain of the West Point fortifications. Coates's vantage point is a famous one, repeating (as is typical of his work) that of a shortly-preceding engraving by G. K. Richardson, after a drawing of c. 1836 by William Henry Bartlett (1809-1854), published by Nathaniel Parker Willis in American Scenery; or, Land, Lake, and River Illustrations of Transatlantic Nature (2 vols., London and New York, 1840; see also Coates's "Kosciusko Monument" in this same catalogue). Currier and Ives later published a closely similar view, and Coates's exact contemporary J. F. Kensett (1816-1872) essentially repeated it in his 1857 "Hudson River Scene" in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Natalie Spassky, American Paintings, New York, 1985, vol. 2, pp. 33-34). In its dramatic contrasts of light and shade, its alternately dense and luminous colors, and especially in its solitary figure, Coates's considerably earlier canvas is more intimately related to the pioneer painters of the Hudson River School, such as Thomas Cole (1801-1848), whose "View of Fort Putnam" (1826, Philadelphia Museum of Art) helped to establish the beginnings of this essentially American landscape tradition (Elise Effmann, The Magazine Antiques, 166:5, November 2004 pp. 154-159).