Cole, Thomas

Cole, Thomas (1801–1848), America's leading landscape painter during the second quarter of the nineteenth century.Cole was born in Bolton‐le‐Moors, England. Trained as an engraver, he immigrated to the United States in 1818 and, after seven years as an artistic jack‐of‐all‐trades in Pennsylvania and Ohio, arrived in New York, where his paintings of Hudson Valley landscapes brought him almost instant success. During his relatively brief career, he painted European and American landscapes as well as historical works and allegories of which The Course of Empire series and The Voyage of Life series are the best known.

Cole's landscapes were generally naturalistic. Adapting European artistic forms and aesthetic theories to American scenery, he often depicted a pristine American wilderness, as in his well‐known Kaaterskill Falls (1827). He also painted pastoral scenes, for example, View on the Catskill, Early Autumn (1837), a vision of a peaceful valley as yet undisturbed by industry. Traveling to Europe in 1829–1832 and again in 1841–1842, Cole added subjects from the grand tour to his repertory.

Cole is remembered primarily as a romantic landscapist and as founder of the Hudson River school, which also included Asher B. Durand (1796–1886), his frequent painting companion, and Frederick Edwin Church (1826–1900), his student. Yet even before his first European sojourn, Cole was preoccupied with history painting. An able poet and talented essayist—his 1836 Essay on American Scenery is a classic statement of American landscape aesthetics—he employed texts of his own devising for his major historical allegories. Highly critical of democracy and fearful of the effects of industrialization, he believed that American society was irrevocably headed for disaster. His Course of Empire series was a thinly veiled attack on Jacksonian Democracy, while the moralizing Voyage of Life and unfinished Cross and the World series proclaimed a religious alternative to the futility of secular history.
See also Early Republic, Era of the; Jackson, Andrew; Painting: To 1945; Romantic Movement.

Bibliography

Louis Legrand Noble , The Life and Works of Thomas Cole, 1853; reprint, ed. Elliot S. Vesell, 1964.
William C. Truettner and Alan Wallach, eds., Thomas Cole: Landscape into History, 1994.

Alan Wallach