Thomas Cole

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(b Bolton-le-Moor, Lancs, 1 Feb 1801; d Catskill, NY, 11 or 12 Feb 1848). American painter and poet of English birth. He was the leading figure in American landscape painting during the first half of the 19th century and had a significant influence on the painters of the HUDSON RIVER SCHOOL, among them Jasper Cropsey, Asher B. Durand and Frederic Church (Cole's only student). In the 1850s these painters revived the moralizing narrative style of landscape in which Cole had worked during the 1830s. From the 1850s the expressive, Romantic landscape manner of Cole was eclipsed by a more direct and objective rendering of nature, yet his position at the beginning of an American landscape tradition remained unchallenged.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

Thomas Cole (1801-1848) was the founder of the Hudson River school of romantic American landscape painting. He treated the idyllic as well as the formidable aspects of nature in great detail and was also noted for his allegorical subjects.

Thomas Cole was born in Bolton-le-Moors, Lancaster, England, and emigrated with his family to Philadelphia in 1818. They soon moved to Steubenville, Ohio, where Thomas, who had studied engraving briefly in England, taught art in his sister's school. He then tried to be an itinerant portrait painter. Seeking better patronage, he returned to Philadelphia in 1823 to paint landscapes and decorate Japan ware. He took drawing lessons at the Pennsylvania Academy and exhibited there for the first time in 1824.

Moving to New York the following year Cole began to receive recognition and may at this time be said to have set in motion the taste for romantic landscape - a genre which would later become known as the Hudson River school. Taking a trip up the Hudson River, he painted three landscapes. Placed in the window of Coleman's Art Store, they were purchased at $25 apiece by three well-known artists of the day: John Trumbull, Asher Durand, and William Dunlap. Cole was now established and able to support himself by his landscapes.

Cole moved up the Hudson in 1826 to Catskill. After seeing the great scenic wonders of the White Mountains and Niagara, he sailed for England in 1829 under the patronage of Robert Gilmore of Baltimore. Although Cole admired the paintings of Claude Lorrain and Gaspard Poussin, he spent little time in European museums, preferring to sketch out of doors. After a brief visit to Paris he went down the Rhone River and then to Italy. After nine weeks in Florence he went to Rome, accomplishing most of the journey on foot.

Returning to New York in 1832, Cole was given a commission by an art patron to execute five panels. Known as the Course of Empire, these were considerably influenced by J.M.W. Turner's Building of Carthage, which Cole had seen in London.

In November 1836 Cole married Maria Barton, whose family home in Catskill became their permanent residence. Commissions came in from William P. Van Rensselaer for The Departure and The Return, from P. G. Stuyvesant for Past and Present, and from Samuel Ward for four panels, the Voyage of Life.

In 1841 Cole went to Europe again. On returning home he visited Mount Desert on the coast of Maine and Niagara. At the time of his death on Feb. 11, 1848, he was at work on a religious allegory, the Cross of the World.

With the overland expansion of America, people took great interest in their land and the various aspects of nature. Cole established landscape painting as an accepted form of art. He was a Swedenborgian mystic, and his paintings reflect his intensely religious feelings; never dealing with the trivial, his work has a high moral tone. He had a profound reverence for nature, which he depicted sometimes in a tranquil mood and at other times in a state of violence. He makes the viewer feel man as a helpless creature overwhelmed by the all-powerful forces of nature. He frequently placed a highly detailed tree at the right or left foreground (an inheritance from baroque stage settings), and the landscape beyond unfolds as on a stage. His was a highly romanticized version of nature often overlaid with elements of fantasy and sometimes even including medieval or classical ruins.

Further Reading

In the absence of a modern study of Cole, the best source is Louis Legrand Noble, The Life and Works of Thomas Cole (1853; edited, with an introduction, by Elliot Vesell, 1964); it includes correspondence and other documents. Howard S. Merritt, Thomas Cole (1969), an exhibition catalog, includes a critical introduction. For shorter notices see Frederick A. Sweet, The Hudson River School and the Early American Landscape Tradition (1945), and Esther Seaver, ed., Thomas Cole: One Hundred Years Later (1949).

Additional Sources

Baigell, Matthew, Thomas Cole, New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 1981.

Parry, Ellwood, The art of Thomas Cole: ambition and imagination, Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988.

Not to be confused with Thomas Cole, a New Zealand mayor, Dr. Thomas W. Cole, former President of Clark Atlanta University and Chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, or Tom Cole, the Oklahoma representative.

Thomas Cole
Thomas Cole, 1846
Born	February 1, 1801(1801-02-01) Bolton, Lancashire, England
Died	February 11, 1848 (aged 47) Catskill, New York
Nationality	English, American
Field	Painting
Movement	Hudson River School
Works	[1]
Influenced	Asher B. Durand and Frederic Edwin Church

Romantic landscape with Ruined Tower (1832-36)

Thomas Cole (February 1, 1801 – February 11, 1848) was an English-born American artist. He is regarded as the founder of the Hudson River School, an American art movement that flourished in the mid-19th century. Cole's Hudson River School, as well as his own work, was known for its realistic and detailed portrayal of American landscape and wilderness, which feature themes of romanticism and naturalism.

Contents 1 Early life and education 2 Painting 3 Catskills 4 Architecture work 5 See also 6 Selected works 7 References 8 External links

Early life and education

He was born in Bolton, Lancashire, England in 1801. In 1818 his family immigrated 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. Moving to Pittsburgh in 1823 and then to Philadelphia in 1824, where he drew from casts at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, he rejoined his parents and sister in New York City early in 1825.

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 famous Kaaterskill Falls and the ruins of Fort Putnam.^[1][2] Returning to New York he displayed three landscapes in the window of a bookstore; according to the New York Evening Post,^[3] this garnered Cole the attention of John Trumbull, Asher B. 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 of Baltimore and Daniel Wadsworth of Hartford, 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 desolution—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, one at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., the other at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York. Among Cole's other famous works are the Oxbow (1836) (pictured below), the Notch of the White Mountains, and Daniel Boone at His cabin at the Great Osage Lake.^[4]

Cole influenced his artistic peers, especially Asher B. Durand and Frederic Edwin Church, who studied with Cole from 1844 to 1846. Cole spent the years 1829 to 1832 and 1841-1842 abroad, mainly in England and Italy; in Florence he lived with the sculptor Horatio Greenough.

Catskills

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 owner, and became a year-round resident. Thomas and Maria had five children:

• Theodore Alexander Cole, born January 1, 1838
• Mary Bartow Cole, born September 23, 1839
• Emily Cole, born August 27, 1843
• Elizabeth Cole, born April 5, 1847 (died in infancy)
• Thomas Cole, Jr., born September 16, 1848^[5]

Thomas Cole died at Catskill on February 11, 1848. The fourth highest peak in the Catskills is named Thomas Cole Mountain in his honor.^[6] Cedar Grove, also known as the Thomas Cole House, was declared a National Historic Site in 1999 and is now open to the public.^[7]

Architecture work

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 premium, 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.

See also

• Hudson River School
• The Voyage of Life
• The Course of Empire
• List of Hudson River School artists

Selected works

The Garden of Eden (1828)	The Oxbow (The Connecticut River near Northampton) (1836)	The Departure (1837)	The Return (1837)
The Past (1838)	The Present (1838)	L'Allegro (Italian Sunset) (1845)	Il Penseroso (1845)

References

1. ^ Thomas Cole's View of Fort Putnam | Magazine Antiques | Find Articles at BNET
2. ^ http://hamiltonauctiongalleries.com/COLE-T25FP.JPG
3. ^ Thomas Cole
4. ^ Property and Progress: Antebellum Landscape Art and Property Law
5. ^ "A Guide to the Thomas Cole Collection". Albany Institute of History and Art. pp. 9. http://www.albanyinstitute.org/collections/library/Research_and_Resources/FindingAids/Cole%20CV553.pdf. Retrieved 2009-01-06. 
6. ^ Cedar Grove History
7. ^ "History of Cedar Grove". The Thomas Cole National Historic Site. http://www.thomascole.org/learn_history.htm. Retrieved 2007-10-30. 

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Thomas Cole

• Hiking Thomas Cole Mountain Catskill 3500 Club
• Cedar Grove - The Thomas Cole National Historical Site in Catskill, NY
• 141 works by Thomas Cole at www.Thomas-Cole.info
• Find-A-Grave profile for Thomas Cole
• Works by Thomas Cole at the Cincinnati Art Museum
• White Mountain paintings by Thomas Cole
• Information about Thomas Cole can be found in the Thomas Cole Collection, which contains correspondence, financial and legal documents, clippings, exhibition catalogs, poems related to him and his family, in the Albany Institute of History & Art Library.
• Thomas A. Cole Papers, 1821-1863. This finding aid contains biographical information about Cole and describes the collection of his papers (correspondence, journals, notebooks, essays and poetry) held by the New York State Library.
• Thomas Cole's Journal, 1834-1848. The journal, which was digitized by the New York State Library, contains scattered handwritten entries from November 5, 1834, through February 1, 1848.

v • d • e Hudson River School Movements: << Age of Enlightenment • Romanticism • Victorianism / Realism >> Artists: Thomas Cole • Asher Brown Durand • Frederic Edwin Church • John Frederick Kensett • Sanford Robinson Gifford • Albert Bierstadt Museums: Metropolitan Museum of Art • Wadsworth Atheneum • National Gallery of Art • New-York Historical Society • Westervelt Warner • Brooklyn Museum Locations: Catskill Mountain House • Kaaterskill Falls • North-South Lake • Olana • Thomas Cole House

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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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