The Spell of the Platte A MONA Moment By Ron Roth Director Museum of Nebraska Art

You know the kind of moment.

Perhaps you're in a draw on the Platte River, early spring, watching a cloud of snowgeese or cranes rising and billowing like a sail; or you are in your own back yard watching a sunrise--a pink conflagration in the east--and nearby, from the limb of a silver maple a cardinal's brittle song falls in a pure offering.

And you say to yourself, if you could just save this moment, put it somewhere where you can collect it again and savor its delicious harmony. It is for just this reason that we have art, these islands of refreshment we call art museums. It is on these walls you find landscape paintings where as Emerson described "the tempered light of the woods is like a perpetual morning, and is stimulating and heroic. The ancient's reputed spells of these places creep on us. The stems of pines, hemlocks and oaks gleam like iron on the exceited eye. The incommunicable trees begin to persuade us to live with them and quit our life of solemn trifles. Here no history or state is interpolated on the divine sky and the immortal year. . . .where everything that has life gives sign of satisfaction, the cattle that lie on the ground seem to have great and tranquil thoughts. These enchantments are medicine, they sober and heal us."

And in the painting by Worthington Whittredge from MONA's collection, "Cattle Along the Platte," who's to say that these cows in the middle ground are not thinking great and tranquil thoughts.

Whittredge was born in a log cabin in Ohio, had no formal, academic training as an artist, but had had enough obvious skill to be sponsored by some Cincinnatians enabling him to spend years in Europe studying and developing his talent.

He returned to America and began a career devoted to landscape painting, and, as he said, "the primitive woods with their solemn silence reigning everywhere."

In 1865, Whittredge, along with several other artists joined an expedition into the Colorado Rockies organized by the government. They explored over 2000 miles of spectacular mountain scenery. But interestingly, what this trip brought to his work was a concentration and interest in the low-lying plains in the shadow of the mountains. In this work, the mountains serve as distant walls to enclose his compositions, pictures of "vastness and the appearance everywhere of innocent, primitive existence."

Thus, in Cattle Along the Platte, the Colorado Rockies, looming in their snow covered peaks are peacefully overwhelmed with the rich ochre of the Platte Valley Flats in summer, and the regal reach of a majestic burr oak. Here their heroic vistas are muted in the hazy warmth of a summer day, a footnote to the grand translucent calm of an epic sky reaching quietly upward into the sweet atmosphere of Robin's egg blue.