Mount Holyoke Alan Wallach Analysis

Alan Wallach, "Making a Picture of the View from Mount Holyoke," in American Iconology: New Approaches to Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature, ed. David C. Miller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 83-84

In “Making a Picture of the View from Mount Holyoke”, Alan Wallach argues that Thomas Cole created a new perspective of landscape art in his 1836 painting of View from Mount Holyoke (The Oxbow). His perspective merges a panoramic view with precise attention to detail, and with those things The Oxbow has the ability to give the viewer a sense of power. Wallach states that “the tourist experiences a sudden access of power, a sudden dizzying sense of having suddenly come into possession of a terrain stretching as far as the eye could see”. This combination of optical elevation with a sense of power created the “pantropic sublime”.

Wallach’s overall argument that The Oxbow’s panoptic vision provides the viewer with a sense of power is very well written and backed with strong opinions and educated sources.

He argues that the idea of panoptic sublime is more than just the action of seeing but a more intense and explosive ideology involving a sense of power. He uses Jeremy Bentham’s idea of a prison tower to further explain the relationship of vison and power. He says that the prison tower is used for constant surveillance over inmates giving the person watching a feeling of superiority. We get a sense of superiority when we feel nothing is hidden, as if we know everything, and that makes us feel powerful. He also mentions the phrase “optical hierarchy” when describing the feeling panoptic sublime. Those two words make the reader feel as if they are looking down on Mount Holyoke; giving the reader an insight into the feeling of the panoptic sublime. Wallach achieved his intended goal in explaining and demonstrating the existence of the panoptic sublime in The

Oxbow.
As described above, Wallach’s purpose was to inform the reader about the relationship between vision and power. He strays away from his main point when he brings up the idea of Cole tracing Hall’s amateur drawing of Mount Holyoke. Does that really matter in terms of feeling powerful when looking at something from above? To argue the exact date Cole made the tracing strays away from the main idea and takes the reader into a whole different story.
A second weakness in "Making a Picture of the View from Mount Holyoke" is the structure of the article. It seems as if he is all over the place with his thoughts. He voices the main point, panoptic sublime, by first explaining the idea of the panoramic view. He then proposes the question, could a painting actually be made from the view of Mount Holyoke? He then explains Cole’s process leading up to his revolutionary masterpiece. Chronologically speaking, the question of possibility should be asked first, giving the reader a chance to form their own opinions. Then the process should be mentioned to further explain the painting in question and why The Oxbow was so revolutionary. Mentioning these ideas first would lead the reader into understanding the strange relationship vision has to power and further support his idea of panoptic sublime.
In contrast to the structure of the article, his conclusion is very well written. He ties in all of his ideas with Thomas Cole’s letter to Luman Reed. The invention of the panoptic sublime, this idea of power caused by optical hierarchy, is combined in a nutshell when Cole explains to Reed that his painting will be novel and well known.
In Alan Wallach’s "Making a Picture of the View from Mount Holyoke" he explains the extremely difficult relationship of vision with power. He does an excellent job in explaining the feeling of panoptic sublime to the reader. Putting a feeling into words is a very difficult task that was accomplished in this article.