Thomas Cole

Thomas Cole (1801-1848), American painter, extremely influential for American landscape painting. Cole believed that the scenery of the United States—its rugged mountains and brilliant autumn forests—provided perfect subjects for American artists, instead of the picturesque European ruins then popular among painters. Cole inspired a group of landscape painters, including Asher Durand and Frederick Church, that became known as the Hudson River School.

Born in Bolton, a textile center in Lancashire, England, Cole began his artistic career in England as an engraver of wooden blocks used for printing cloth. In 1818 he immigrated to the United States with his parents and continued working as an engraver. In 1823 he began drawing plaster casts of sculpture at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Two years later he moved to New York City and made his first trip up the Hudson River to sketch in the Catskill Mountains. His earliest paintings were scenes of the Catskills. By 1829, when he went to Europe to study the art of the past, he had established a reputation as a leading American landscape painter.

Cole’s landscape paintings emphasize the dramatic aspects of nature. Storm clouds intrude on sunlit panoramas. Trees battered by wind have been stripped of their leaves, their branches twisted and their trunks bent. People rarely interrupt these solitary scenes; they would be overwhelmed by the drama. These were not realistic views of what the artist saw. Cole made many sketches outdoors and later combined and exaggerated features to show nature at its most awe-inspiring.

The theme of growth and change lies behind many of these landscapes. A painting such as The Oxbow (1836, Metropolitan Museum, New York) contrasts the untamed wilderness during a thunderstorm, to the left of the painting, with sunlit, cultivated fields to the right. Presumably this contrast reflects the progress of the young nation. Yet Cole distrusted the direction in which he saw the country moving—toward industrialization, materialism, and the loss of its wilderness. A series of five canvases, inspired by the time he spent in Italy during the early 1830s, carry a moral and a warning. The series, entitled The Course of Empire (1834-1836, New York Historical Society), illustrates the rise and fall of a civilization, from its “savage state” to its “desolation.” Civilization at its height is represented in The Consummation of Empire, where the people enjoy a life of luxury amid gleaming white marble buildings and monuments. In the final stage, only ruins remain.