Benjamin Moser, asked to name one artwork he considers a "revelation," chose a painting by John Frederick Kensett that hangs on the walls of the Century Association on Manhattan's West 43rd Street. The work depicts Mount Chocorua, in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

Moser traces the mountain's cultural weight. Today, in an age of easy travel to more distant destinations, the peak looms less spectacularly than it did in the 19th century, when it functioned as a kind of American Matterhorn: sung by poets, painted by artists, and haunted by a thrilling legend — of an Indian chief named Chocorua who, after cursing the whites, threw himself off its summit.

Kensett himself carries a transatlantic biography. He was the son of a British engraver who emigrated to New Haven, Connecticut. In the pictures Moser found of him, the painter gazes out with rheumy eyes. His paintings share the Hudson River School's luminosity — that sense of dawn or sunset, of warm autumn rather than blazing summer or bleak winter.

The world Kensett built on canvas is an undisturbed arcadia. Men sleep restfully and arise to purposeful labor. Seen from honking Manhattan, the scene beckons with the promise of picnics and porches and swims in the lake, an image of a better, purer, happier age.

Then comes the arrest. Step away from the gentle mountains, the neat wooden farmhouse, the grazing flocks, and the date on the frame stops you: 1864. Kensett painted this picture one year after Gettysburg and the Emancipation Proclamation, one year before Appomattox and the assassination of Lincoln. He painted it in the year of the slaughter of tens of thousands during the Wilderness Campaign, and in the year of the burning of Atlanta.

"Perhaps never in our history had the country's reality been so distant from this gently golden image," Moser writes.

That gap between canvas and context is the crux of his choice. Looking at the painting "in our own dreadful times," Moser sees a man summoning the courage to step away from the news and create an image — not of a country tearing itself apart in a horrifying war, but of a country that might yet emerge from it.

For Moser, the painting does not show the nation as it was. It shows the nation that might yet be.

He is direct about what the picture omits: slavery, genocide, war. Yet he refuses to read the work as escapism. "I see, rather than a flight from the reality of our history, a summons to overcome that history: to look, even through bloodshot eyes, and dare to envision a better world," he writes.

The choice reframes a familiar genre. Hudson River School landscapes are often treated as pastoral nostalgia — decorative visions of a pre-industrial Eden. Moser's reading of the Kensett insists on the opposite: that the serenity of 1864 was hard-won, deliberate, even defiant, produced in the bloodiest year of American history by a painter who chose to look past the news toward what the country could become.

The painting remains at the Century Association, the private club on West 43rd Street where it glows, as Moser puts it, harmlessly. Its power, in his account, lies in that very harmlessness — a golden stillness painted amid catastrophe, and an argument, still legible more than 160 years later, that imagining a better world is an act of courage rather than denial.