View from Cozzen's Hotel near West Point, N.Y.

John Frederick Kensett captured this landscape, "View from Cozzen's Hotel near West Point, N.Y.," during a period when the Hudson River School was shaping American identity through idealized natural scenes. Kensett, like his contemporaries, wasn't just painting pretty pictures; he was crafting a vision of America as a promised land. However, these landscapes often mask the complexities of race and class. As we gaze upon this serene vista, it's important to consider whose stories are absent. The Indigenous populations, displaced to make way for this picturesque scene, and the enslaved Africans, whose labor underpinned the economic prosperity that funded leisure spots like Cozzen's Hotel, are notably missing from this view. Kensett invites us to revel in the beauty of the Hudson River, yet the true cost of this beauty remains largely unseen.