It is a perfectly natural impulse for us to wish the house of a cherished writer to illuminate his works. We are strangely pleased to visit the various houses where Edgar Allan Poe boarded and find them cramped and forlorn. Or to discover that Sunnyside, Washington Irving’s house on the Hudson River, is a fantasy of a romantic Dutch cottage that might have loomed in one of his stories, mysterious in the moonlight. Or that Mark Twain’s house in Hartford is a Victorian carnival of spiky dormers and angular gables, vibrating like a paddle steamer about to shove off, or explode.

But all these houses ever really illuminate is biography—the writer’s good taste, or lack thereof (or, in Poe’s case, his poverty). Their relationship to the literature is indirect. Our interest in a writer is what happens in his mind and not outside his window. Not so with the painter, for whom the house, and its site, can mean everything. For example, Cedar Grove, the house of Thomas Cole (1801–48), the founder of the Hudson River School. It stands in Catskill, New York, overlooking the banks of the Hudson River, whose scenery and significance Cole made the central subject of American landscape painting. Not so long ago the Hudson River School was considered the very acme of mawkish sentimentality, but Cedar Grove, just restored, helps us see this painting for what it was, the first expression of environmental thought in America—and thought of the most tragic sort.