We Asked Benjamin Moser to Name One Artwork He Considers a “Revelation”

Glowing harmlessly on the walls of the Century Association on Manhattan’s West 43rd Street is a work by John Frederick Kensett. It shows Mount Chocorua, in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Today, in an age of easy travel to more exotic climes, this peak looms a bit less spectacularly than it did in the 19th century, when it was a kind of American Matterhorn: sung by our poets; painted by our artists; haunted, thrillingly, by a spooky legend—of an Indian chief named Chocorua who,