An English immigrant taught Americans to see their wilderness as Eden
Thomas Cole grew up amid the smoky mill towns of industrial Lancashire, emigrated to the United States at seventeen, and taught himself to paint. His brooding views of the Catskills and the Hudson Valley launched the Hudson River School, America's first great landscape movement, and quietly criticised the industry and expansion transforming the country.
Cole was born in Bolton le Moors on 1 February 1801. His family crossed the Atlantic in 1818 and settled in Steubenville, Ohio. He worked first as an engraver, learned painting largely from books and other artists' pictures, and began taking portrait commissions in 1822 before turning toward landscape. After a spell in Philadelphia he settled in 1825 in the town of Catskill, his family home until he died.
His break came quickly. A buyer named George Bruen paid for a summer sketching trip up the Hudson, and Cole returned with scenes of Kaaterskill Falls, the Catskill Mountain House and the ruins of Fort Putnam. Five of the landscapes went into a bookshop window; two were bought and lent to an exhibition in 1826. The veteran painter John Trumbull sought Cole out, bought a picture and introduced him to wealthy patrons such as Daniel Wadsworth of Hartford. Between 1825 and 1848, eighty-nine of his works hung at the National Academy of Design.
Cole's pictures are usually allegories in paint: tiny figures or buildings dwarfed by moody, dramatic nature. They present the New World as an untouched paradise, set against the grimy cities of the Britain he had left, and they push back against urban growth and westward expansion. His most ambitious project, The Course of Empire, follows a single landscape through five canvases, from wilderness to imperial splendour to ruin. The Voyage of Life, a four-part series, survives in an 1840 original in Utica and 1842 replicas in Washington. The Oxbow, from 1836, is another landmark.
He travelled to England and Italy from 1829 to 1832 and again in 1841 and 1842. At home he shaped a generation, especially Asher Durand and Frederic Edwin Church, who studied with him from 1844 to 1846 and absorbed his habit of sketching outdoors before composing an idealised finished scene in the studio. Cole died on 11 February 1848, only 47, having given American landscape painting its founding vision.
Source: Thomas Cole
