Thomas Cole

Not to be confused with Thomas Cole, a New Zealand mayor or Tom Cole, the Oklahoma representative.

Thomas Cole
Thomas Cole, ca. 1844-48
Born	February 1 1801(1801-02-01) Bolton, Lancashire, England
Died	February 11 1848 (aged 47) Catskill, New York
Nationality	English
Field	painting
Movement	Hudson River School
Famous works	Thomas Cole, Landscape (1825)
Influenced	Asher B. Durand and Frederic Edwin Church

Thomas Cole (February 1, 1801 - February 11, 1848) was a nineteenth century American artist. He is regarded as the "Founding Father" of the Hudson River School, an American art movement that flourished in the mid-19th century and was concerned with the realistic and detailed portrayal of nature. [1] His romanticized depiction of nature inspired not only artists at the time, but those that followed, to depict the inspiration and beauty of nature, often in a fantastic or allegorical fashion.

Early life and education

Thomas Cole was born in Bolton, Lancashire, England. In 1818 his family emigrated to the United States, settling in Steubenville, Ohio, where Cole learned the rudiments of his profession from a wandering portrait painter named Stein. However, he had little success painting portraits, and his interest shifted to landscape painting. Cole moved to Pittsburgh in 1823 and then to Philadelphia in 1824, where he drew from casts at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and exhibited for the first time. The following year, Cole rejoined his parents and sister in New York City.

Painting

In New York he sold three paintings to George W. Bruen, who financed a summer trip to the Hudson Valley where he visited the Catskill Mountain House and painted the ruins of Fort Putnam[2]. Returning to New York he displayed three landscapes in the window of a bookstore, where as recounted in the pages of the New York Evening Post [3] they attracted the attention of the painter John Trumbull, who sought him out, bought one of his canvases, and put him into contact with a number of his aristocratic friends including Robert Gilmore of Baltimore and Daniel Wadsworth of Hartford, who became important patrons of the artist.

In 1826 he helped to found the National Academy of Design in New York City. That same year Cole moved to Catskill, New York where he maintained a studio at the farm called Cedar Grove. He painted a significant portion of his work in this studio, inspired by the pastoral beauty of the White Mountains and Niagra Falls. Cole spent the years 1829 to 1832 in England and Italy supported by his patron Robert Gilmore. At one point he lived with sculptor Horatio Greenough in Florence. He then returned to New York in 1832 where he begin the five panel series Course of Empire. In 1836 he married Maria Bartow of Catskill, whose family home became their permanent residence.

Religious works and symbols dominated the last decade of Cole's life. In 1840 he completed another series of large allegorical paintings, called the Voyage of Life. [4] retrieved Dec. 18, 2007.

Cole went to Europe again in 1841, returned home, and visited Mount Desert on the Northeast United States coast. He died aged 47 in Catskill, New York on February 11, 1848. His home, Cedar Grove, located in Catskill, is a National Historic Site affiliated with the National Park Service.

William Cullen Bryant in his eulogy for Cole said,

The contemplation of his works made men better. It is said of one of the old Italian painters, that he never began a painting without first offering a prayer. The paintings of Cole are of that nature that it hardly transcends the proper use of language to call them acts of religion. Yet do they never strike us as strained or forced in character ; they teach but what rose spontaneously in the mind of the artist; they were the sincere communications of his own moral and intellectual being.

[5] The fourth highest peak in the Catskills bears his name..

Allegorical Works

Cole was primarily a painter of landscapes, but he also painted allegorical works. The most famous of these are the five-part series, The Course of Empire, which he painted in the winter of 1835-1836 in Catskill. At the time, Cole had strong concerns for the negative impact of industrial development on nature and the Catskill landscape became a major source of his artistic inspiration. The local growth of railroads was said to be particularly disconcerting to him.

Another of Cole's allegorical works includes the four-part The Voyage of Life which he painted two versions of; one which resides at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the other at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York. The second painting of the series shows a young man being sent off down river in a boat by a beckoning angel. The youth, with raised hand, full of promise, looks towards an almost translucent and ethereal palace in the sky. It remains one of of Cole's most popular works.

Nearing the time of his death, Cole, a Swedenborgian mystic, was painting the religous allegory Cross of the World.

Cole's use of allegory appears in the images of power, beauty, and holiness in his paintings. For instance, in his series The Course of Empire, a scene of destruction is wrought amidst a harsh tempest, and in a painting from the Voyage of Life, an angel directs an aging man's gaze to the sky, which casts a holy, welcoming light.

Hudson River School

The Hudson River School was a group of artists influenced by romanticism who painted the landscapes of the Hudson River Valley, the Catskill Mountains, the Adirondack Mountains, and the New Hampshire White Mountains. Thomas Cole is called the founder of this school, having made one of the first landscape paintings of the eastern Catskill Mountains in 1825.

Artistic peers of Cole that he influenced include Asher B. Durand and Frederic Edwin Church, who he studied with from 1844-1846. The Hudson River School also included well known painter Albert Bierstadt and a second generation of painters that were several in number. Some of the latter including Kensett, Gifford, and Church went on to open the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

The Hudson River Art School's thematic scenes of 19th century America bolstered movements to create city parks, protect national parks, and to move west into the vast wilderness of the country. Their works are still valued today for their glorification of nature and their messages of discovery, exploration, and the settlement of America.

Architecture

Cole dabbled in architecture, a not uncommon practice at the time when the profession was not so codified. Cole was an entrant in the design competition held in 1838 to create a new state government building in Columbus, Ohio. His entry won third place, and many contend that the finished building, a composite of the first, second and third place entries, bears a great similarity to Cole's entry. In addition, Cole made designs for a new building for Saint Luke's Episcopal Church in Catskill, New York where he received baptism and became a member in 1842. A stained glass window honors the Cole family in the present building.

Selected works

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  The Voyage of Life Childhood (1842)

• 

  The Voyage of Life Youth (1842)

• 

  The Voyage of Life Manhood (1840)

• 

  The Voyage of Life Old Age (1842)

• 

  The Departure (1837)

• 

  The Return (1837)

• 

  The Past (1838)

• 

  The Present (1838)

• 

  The Course of Empire The Savage State (1836)

• 

  The Course of Empire The Arcadian or Pastoral State (1836)

• 

  The Course of the Empire: The Consummation

• 

  The Course of Empire Destruction (1836)

• 

  The Course of Empire Desolation (1836)

• 

  L'Allegro (Italian Sunset) (1845)

• 

  Il Penseroso (1845)

• 

  The Oxbow (The Connecticut River near Northampton) (1836)

• 

  The Garden of Eden (1828)

• 

  Romantic landscape with Ruined Tower (1832-36)

• Cole Thomas Evening in Arcady 1843.jpg

  Evening in Arcady (1843)

• Cole Thomas Daniel Boone Sitting at the Door of His Cabin on the Great Osage Lake Kentucky 1826.jpg

  Daniel Boone Sitting at the Door of His Cabin on the Great Osage Lake Kentucky (1826)

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Baigell, Matthew. Thomas Cole. Watson-Guptill (January 1, 2000). ISBN 0823006476
• Powell, Earl A. 1990. Thomas Cole. New York: H.N. Abrams. ISBN 0810931583
• Miller, Angela. 1993. The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825-1875. New York: Cornell University Press. ISBN 0801428300
• Noble, Louis Legrand, Thomas Cole, and Elliot S. Vesell. 1997. The Life and Works of Thomas Cole. Hensonville, N.Y.: Black Dome Press. ISBN 1883789133
• "Thomas Cole." Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd ed. 17 Vols. Gale Research, 1998.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Thomas Cole

• Cedar Grove - The Thomas Cole National Historical Site in Catskill, NY
• Find-A-Grave profile for Thomas Cole
• Works by Thomas Cole at the Cincinnati Art Museum

• White Mountain paintings by Thomas Cole

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This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

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