All oil paintings of Thomas Cole (19 century, English,
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1801 - 1848 • American • Painter • Romantic/Hudson River School
"I never succeed in painting scenes, however beautiful, immediately on returning from them. I must wait for time to draw a veil over the common details, the unessential parts which shall leave the great features, whether the beautiful or the sublime, dominant in the mind." - Thomas Cole
American landscape painting during the 19th century was inspired by conflicting drives. One was the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, which proclaimed the white American's divine mandate to claim the "wilderness" for "progress," whether or not it was already inhabited. The other looked at the land already claimed by industrialization with melancholic nostalgia. On each side of the dichotomy, attention was directed at what seemed unique, important, and "American" about the American landscape. Thomas Cole was not the first painter of the American land-he was preceded by, for example, Alvan Fisher (1792-1862) and Thomas Doughty (1793-1856)-but he was the most outstanding of its early interpreters. Born in England, Cole came to America with his parents in 1818. He found the drama of the Hudson River region, and especially the Catskill Mountains, to his taste. He located his studio there and immersed himself in and painted its spectacularly beautiful views, thus establishing what would be named the HUDSON RIVER SCHOOL. Nature was symbolic as well as inspiring for Cole: Details like the "blasted" tree ( destroyed by natural causes such as lightning) could represent a life cut short; a sawed tree represented the incursion of civilization in the wilderness; and a gnarled tree or rock formation could be seen as one of America's natural antiquities. True to the ROMANTIC notion of inspired genius, he often painted in the landscape the small figure of a pensive poet. Cole was a close friend and hiking companion of William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878), America's leading nature poet, who wrote Thanatopsis (1817). Self-taught and an avid American patriot-there was new resistance to European influence-Cole nevertheless believed he must take the European GRAND TOUR, which he did in 1829. After three years he returned home even more persuaded of his adopted country's natural and moral superiority-didacticism infused his work. The Course of Empire ( 1836) is a sequence of five pictures that James Fenimore Cooper called "the work of the highest genius this country has ever produced." In this allegory for the cyclical stages through which a civilization passes, Cole painted Savage, Pastoral, the Con- summation of Empire, Destruction, and Desolation. Whether a caveat to the new nation, documentation of the inevitable, or a political commentary on the Jacksonian era, the content of the message is debated by scholars. So are the scenes in a later, four -painting series, The Voyage of Life ( 1842). Here he metaphorically follows the stages from joyful birth, to hopeful youth, to tormented manhood, to, finally, death and salvation. Cole's own "voyage" ended prematurely when he died of an "inflammation of the lungs" 10 days after his 47th birthday.