View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm, commonly known as The Oxbow, is a seminal American landscape painting by Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School.

[1] Between 1833 and 1836, Thomas Cole, American painter and putative founder of the Hudson River School[2] had been hard at work on his series of paintings The Course of Empire.

Reed had begun to notice Cole was becoming lonely and depressed, and suggested that he suspend work on The Course of Empire and paint something that was more in his element for the April 1836 opening of the National Academy of Design's annual exhibition.

[5] The painting moves from a dark wilderness with shattered tree trunks[6] on rugged cliffs in the foreground covered with violent rain clouds on the left to a light-filled and peaceful, cultivated landscape on the right, which borders the tranquility of the bending Connecticut River.

[9] Cole sold the painting at the exhibition to Charles Nicoll Talbot (1802–1874), merchant in the China trade.

However, she may have been inspired by a similar gesture in 1904 by Samuel P. Avery, Jr., who donated The Titan's Goblet, another of Cole's well-known paintings, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.