“The charming landscape which I saw this morning is indubitably made up of some 20 or 30 farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is the poet.”

The American pioneer of environmentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, wrote these words in his seminal essay, “Nature”, in 1836, the year the British-born father of American landscape painting, Thomas Cole (1801-1848), painted his iconic View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm – The Oxbow.