Thomas Cole (* February 1, 1801 in Bolton, Lancashire; † February 11, 1848 in Catskills, New York) was an English-born American painter.
He is considered the founder and most important representative of the Hudson River School, a group of American artists in the mid-19th century who became known for their accurate, detailed renderings of American landscapes, often combined with historical and allegorical pictorial themes.
Thomas Cole's Life
In his youth in England, Cole learned to make wooden printing blocks used to print calico. In 1818, the family emigrated to America from their home in northwest England and settled in Steubenville, Ohio. Thomas initially remained alone in Philadelphia for a year.
After that, he too moved to Steubenville to join his relatives and worked with them in his father's wallpaper factory. He learned the basics of painting with oil paints from a roving portrait painter named John Stein, but was not very successful himself in his specialty and soon made his first attempts at landscape painting.
In 1823 he followed his family to Pittsburgh, where he also worked in his father's business and made systematic landscape studies in his spare time. In the process, he developed the precise working technique that became the basis of his later landscape painting.
In 1823/24 Cole stayed again in Philadelphia. Here he studied intensively the landscape paintings in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and decided to become a professional painter. In 1825 he moved to New York, where his parents and sisters now lived.
The merchant George W. Bruen became aware of the young painter and financed a study trip along the Hudson River to the Catskill Mountains in September and October 1825. Cole exhibited three small-format oil paintings, created from sketches from this trip, in a shop window.
There they were noticed by John Trumbull, an influential figure in the New York art world, painter and longtime president of the American Academy of Fine Arts, who put the young colleague in touch with the city's most important artists and patrons.
By the time Cole decided to visit Europe in 1829 to become acquainted with the masterpieces of the past in the original, he was already a founding member of the National Academy of Design (an artists' association founded in 1826 that organized annual exhibitions of contemporary American artists and, with headquarters in New York City, still exists today) and recognized as a major American landscape painter.
In Europe, he continued his education in the museums of London, Paris, Florence, Rome and Naples. His stay in Italy, in particular, introduced him to idealistic themes and ideas. As a typical representative of Romanticism, he also sought to express moral values in his landscape painting and to deal with themes that had previously been reserved for history painting.
After his return in November 1832, he found an understanding patron in the New York merchant and gallery owner Luman Reed. From August 1841 to July 1842, Cole traveled to Europe again, visiting relatives in England and touring France, Italy, and Switzerland.
During the trip, he perfected his painting technique, especially coloration and rendering of the sky and clouds. Within the United States, Cole traveled to the Adirondacks, a mountain range in the northeastern part of New York State, in 1846 and to Niagara Falls in 1847.
Beginning in 1825, Cole regularly visited the Catskill locality in New York State. The landscape of the Catskill Mountains fascinated him; he found the mountains "rise out of the valley of the Hudson like waves of an ocean when the storm subsides." During the summer months, the painter lived and worked in outbuildings of a sprawling farm called Cedar Grove.
It was here that a significant portion of his body of work was created. In November 1836 he married Maria Bartow, a niece of the farm owner, and lived there permanently from then on. However, he always kept in close contact with the art scene of New York City, with artists, collectors and literary figures, who also frequently visited him in Cedar Grove.
Among his closer colleagues were the landscape painters Asher Brown Durand (1796-1886) and Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900), who was his student between 1844 and 1846. The Cole couple had three sons and two daughters. In 1842, Thomas Cole decided to join the Episcopal Church and was baptized at St. Luke's Parish in Catskill.
After a brief, violent respiratory illness, he died on Friday, February 11, 1848. Because of the extremely cold weather at the time, few of his friends were able to attend the funeral.
Cedar Grove was added to the list of National Historic Sites in 1999 and, after renovation, has been open to the public since 2001, the bicentennial year of Cole's birth. In honor of the painter, the fourth highest mountain in the Catskill Mountains is named Thomas Cole Mountain.
Thomas Cole was a member of the Masonic League since February 11, 1822; his lodge, Amity Lodge No. 5, is located in Zanesville, Ohio.
Thomas Cole's Work
Cole extolled the value of the landscape itself, the spiritual values inherent in its beauty. The Catskill Mountains (along with impressions from Italy and from the White Mountains, which lie northeast of the Catskills) provided him with the favorite subjects for his numerous pure landscape paintings as well as for those depictions with an explicitly allegorical or historical background.
For him, nature and religion were inseparable. He criticized the development of modernism and accused his contemporaries of no longer respecting simplicity and beauty. In an essay he stated, "Our society strives only to bring something about rather than to enjoy something...".
In an 1826 letter to Baltimore art collector Robert Gilmore Jr. he wrote: "When the imagination is fettered, and only what we can see is described, very seldom will anything truly great be produced in poetry as in painting."
For Luman Reed, Cole painted the five-part cycle titled The Course of Empire (completed in 1836), which is one of his best-known works. The paintings depict, in slightly different landscape settings, the development of a civilization from barbarism through its heyday to dissolution and decline. Contemporary critics rejected the series on formal grounds.
Today, the view is expressed that it was not a promising idea to show not only the rise but also the inevitable end of a society in the still young United States. Most clients, however, preferred directly recognizable American landscapes anyway, which Cole also supplied them with.
Although he often emphasized that he was less fond of painting such pictures, these purely realistic landscape paintings are considered to have the same artistic quality as his generally better-known works with a religious or allegorical accent.
In 1837, he produced two fantasy landscapes, The Departure and The Return. Cole had already painted another pair of thematically related paintings in 1828 with The Garden of Eden and Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, in which he expressed his fears about the impending destruction of nature.
Other allegorical landscapes include Dream of Arcadia (1838) and The Architect's Dream (1840). In addition, available in two versions, is the four-part series The Voyage of Life from 1842, which is also one of Cole's particularly well-known works.
It depicts a journey on the river of life through the four stages of man's life as a child, youth, adult, and old man, each guided by a guardian angel. The landscape is shown in moods of the four seasons. As is usual in Cole's paintings, people or animals are shown very small, landscape and sky dominate the scene and play the real leading role.
The Voyage of Life
Buildings and Texts of Thomas Cole
Occasionally, Cole worked as an architect, but without much training. In 1836 he entered a competition for a government building in Columbus, Ohio, and won third prize. The finished building then incorporated elements from the designs of the first three prize winners, but resembled Cole's contribution more than anything else. After the church building of St. Luke's Episcopal Parish in Catskill was destroyed in a fire, the new building was built to a design by Cole.
In the 1840s, New York newspapers and magazines published letters and poems by Cole. He wrote detailed diaries and penned a well-received essay on the landscapes of America (Essay on American Scenery, 1835). In it he praised the beauties of unspoiled nature.
He thought the landscapes of Europe reflected the ravages of civilization, for which entire forests had been cleared, mountains removed, and rivers diverted. The wilderness of America, on the other hand, he saw as a manifestation of God's grace and lamented that the signs of progress were gradually becoming visible here as well.