Thomas Cole

Thomas Cole (1801-1848) was an English-born American artist and the founder of the Hudson River School art movement. Cole is widely regarded as the first significant American landscape painter. He was known for his romantic landscape and history paintings. Influenced by European painters, but with a strong American sensibility, he was prolific throughout his career and worked primarily with oil on canvas. His paintings are typically allegorical and often depict small figures or structures set against moody and evocative natural landscapes. They are usually escapist, framing the New World as a natural Eden contrasting with the smog-filled cityscapes of Industrial Revolution-era Britain, in which he grew up. His works, often seen as conservative, criticise the contemporary trends of industrialism, urbanism, and westward expansion.

Born in Bolton le Moors in Lancashire on 1 February 1801, Thomas Cole immigrated with his family to the United States in 1818, settling in Steubenville, Ohio. At the age of twenty-two, he moved to Philadelphia and later, in 1825, to Catskill, New York, where he lived with his children and wife until his death in 1848.

Cole found work early on as an engraver. He was largely self-taught as a painter, relying on books and by studying the work of other artists. In 1822, he started working as a portrait painter and later on, gradually shifted his focus to landscape.

In New York, Cole sold three paintings to George W. Bruen, who subsequently financed a summer trip to the Hudson Valley, where the artist produced landscapes featuring the Catskill Mountain House, the famous Kaaterskill Falls, the ruins of Fort Putnam, and two views of Cold Spring. Returning to New York, he displayed five landscapes in the window of William Colman's bookstore; according to the New York Evening Post, the two views of Cold Spring were purchased by A. Seton, who lent them to the American Academy of the Fine Arts annual exhibition in 1826. This garnered Cole the attention of John Trumbull, Asher Brown Durand, and William Dunlap. Among the paintings was a landscape called View of Fort Ticonderoga from Gelyna. Trumbull was especially impressed with the work of the young artist and sought him out, bought one of his paintings, and put him into contact with a number of his wealthy friends, including Robert Gilmor Jr. of Baltimore and Daniel Wadsworth of Hartford, Connecticut, who became important patrons of the artist.

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 depict the same landscape over generations, from a near state of nature to consummation of empire, and then decline and desolation, now in the collection of the New-York Historical Society and the four-part The Voyage of Life. There are two versions of the latter, the 1840 original at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York and the 1842 replicas with minor alterations at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. Among Cole's other famous works are The Oxbow (1836), The Notch of the White Mountains, Daniel Boone at his cabin at the Great Osage Lake, and Lake with Dead Trees (1825) which is at the Allen Memorial Art Museum. He also painted The Garden of Eden (1828), with lavish detail of Adam and Eve living amid waterfalls, vivid plants, and deer. In 2014, friezes painted by Cole on the walls of his home, which had been decorated over, were discovered.

Cole influenced his peers in the art movement later termed the Hudson River School, especially Durand and Frederic Edwin Church. Church studied with Cole from 1844 to 1846, where he learned Cole's technique of sketching from nature and later developing an idealised, finished composition; Cole's influence is particularly notable in Church's early paintings. Cole spent the years 1829 to 1832 and 1841 to 1842 abroad, mainly in England and Italy.

Cole is best known for his work as an American landscape artist. In an 1836 article on "American Scenery", he described his complex relationship with the American landscape in aesthetic, emotional, and spiritual terms. He also produced thousands of sketches of varying subject matter. 

In 1842, Cole embarked on the Grand Tour in an effort to study in the style of the Old Masters and to paint its scenery. Most striking to Cole was the tallest active volcano in Europe, Mount Etna. Cole was so moved by the volcano's beauty that he produced several sketches and at least six paintings of it. The most famous of these works is A View of Mount Etna from Taormina which is a 1,980 by 3,050mm oil on canvas. Cole also produced a highly detailed sketch View of Mount Etna which shows a panoramic view of the volcano with the crumbling walls of the ancient Greek theatre of Taormina on the far right.

Cole was also a poet and 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 the Ohio Statehouse 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.

After 1827 Cole maintained a studio at the farm called Cedar Grove, in the town of Catskill, New York. He painted a significant portion of his work in this studio. In 1836, he married Maria Bartow of Catskill, a niece of the owners, and became a year-round resident. Thomas and Maria had five children. His daughter Emily Cole (1843-1913) was a botanical artist who worked in watercolour and painted porcelain. Cole's sister, Sarah Cole, was also a landscape painter.