We are not announcing a reopening date at this time and will provide updates on our websites and social media. Cole became one of the founding members of the National Academy of Design in 1825. Thomas Cole apprenticed to a calico designer in Lancashire, England, but moved to Philadelphia with his family when he was a teenager. This is a part of the Wikipedia article used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). However, he is known for visible brushwork and sublime features in his landscapes including broken tree branches, rocky outcroppings, and dramatic atmospheres; moreover, his developed skies have dimension and are not flat. At the age of 22, Cole moved to Philadelphia and later, in 1825, to Catskill, New York, where he lived with his wife and children until 1847. Moving to New York City in spring 1825, Cole made a trip up the Hudson River to the eastern Catskill Mountains. The paintings of Thomas Cole, like the writings of his contemporary Ralph Waldo Emerson, stand as monuments to the dreams and anxieties of the fledgling American nation during the mid-19th century; and they are also euphoric celebrations of its natural landscapes. Cole is considered the first artist to bring the eye of a European Romantic landscape painter to those environments, but also a figure whose idealism and religious sensibilities expressed a uniquely American spirit. Thomas Cole apprenticed to a calico designer in Lancashire, England, but moved to Philadelphia with his family when he was a teenager. Thomas Cole believed landscape paintings could impart moral and religious values. Thomas Cole was an American 19th Century painter who was born in 1801. By February of 1843, Thomas Cole was realizing that he had become a public figure and commented on this in his letters. There are two versions of the latter, one at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., the other at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York. Not only did Cole inspire the nation; he also influenced many artists who are now heading Cole’s way. He is regarded as the founder of the Hudson River School, an American art movement that flourished in the mid-19th century. This is a grand landscape painting with undertones about the growth of civilization in America during the 19th century. He was largely self-taught as a painter, relying on books and by studying the work of other artists. By 1846, Cole was at work on his largest and most ambitious series, The Cross and the World, but in February 1848 contracted pleurisy and died before completing it. … The south wind blew strongly, and dark masses of cloud moved across the twilight sky, the heralds of approaching storm. Cole had a keen interest in geology throughout his life (Bedell, 349). The most famous of these are the five-part series, The Course of Empire, which depict the same landscape over generations—from a near state of nature to consummation of empire, and then decline and desolation—now in the collection of the New York Historical Society and the four-part The Voyage of Life. Morning (1832). In Rome he occupied the studio of Claude Lorrain, the famous seventeenth-century French artist, whom Cole considered ​“the greatest of all landscape painters.” In 1836 he returned to America and married Maria Bartow of Catskill, where he then set up his studio and residence. Cole’s travels and the encouragement and patronage of the New York merchant Luman Reed culminated in his most ambitious historical landscape series, The Course of Empire (1833–1836), five pictures dramatizing the rise and fall of an ancient classical state. A leaden hue overspread the vale, the woods, and the distant mountains. Because he was the first American artist to picture the wilderness with the passion of a poet and to capture its spaciousness and grandeur with technical skill, Cole exerted a strong influence on the new direction landscape painting was to take. Thomas Cole inspired the generation of American landscape painters that came to be known as the Hudson River School. For the second piece in the series, Cole shifts the … Thomas Cole, American Romantic landscape painter who was a founder of the Hudson River school. Trumbull brought Cole to the attention of various patrons, who began eagerly buying his work. Among Cole's other famous works are the Oxbow (1836) (pictured below), the Notch of the White Mountains, Daniel Boone at his cabin at the Great Osage Lake, and Lake with Dead Trees (1825) which is at the Allen Memorial Art Museum. To prove that, if not to disprove all existence, would be to render all things doubtful.”, Jane Dillenberger and Joshua C. Taylor The Hand and the Spirit: Religious Art in America 1700–1900 (Berkeley, Cal. A journal entry for May 31,1835, reads, in part: “I did not go to church today. Young America: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum commemorates “Treasures to Go,” a series of eight exhibitions from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which toured the nation through 2002. He was in love with the sublime wildness of the American landscape and sought to preserve it with his art, but his very presence in that landscape, and the development of his career, depended on the processes of urbanization and civilization which threatened it. Thomas Cole inspired the generation of American landscape painters that came to be known as the Hudson River School.Born in Bolton-le-Moors, Lancashire, England, in 1801, at the age of seventeen he emigrated with his family to the United States, first working as a wood engraver in Philadelphia before going to Steubenville, Ohio, where his father had established a wallpaper manufacturing business. … I read a little, wrote, and walked, and looked at the landscape. I thought of the uncertainty of life; its bootless toil and brevity. Thereafter he painted many Italian subjects, like View near Tivoli. In 1841–1842 he made a second trip abroad to London, Paris, Rome, and Sicily. In 1829 he went to England and exhibited there, then to France, and in 1831–1832 he lived and toured in Italy. Thomas Cole (February 1, 1801 – February 11, 1848) was an English-born American painter known for his landscape and history paintings. One of the major 19th-century American painters, he is regarded as the founder of the Hudson River School, an American art movement that flourished in the mid-19th century. In his works, we find the dramatic splendor of Caspar David Freidrich or J.M.W Turner transposed onto the Catskill and Adirondack Mountains. He painted in a naturalistic style, so the pictured scenes tend to look life-like. In 1822, Cole started working as a portrait painter and later on, gradually shifted his focus to landscape. Thomas Cole made many references in his paintings to the biblical Flood. “The sky is the soul of all scenery. Cole was born in Lancashire, England, and at the age of seventeen, he arrived with his family in Philadelphia. Three of his first paintings were purchased by well-known artists, which helped establish his reputation rapidly. The Great Originator, the Mighty One, the Unspeakable, hath not created for purposes vain and useless this power of conceiving … this wish and ​‘longing after immortality,’ this hope … this faith which gives an energy to virtue, and raises in the breast these lofty aspirations … this fear of sinning, of deception and delusion. Cole was also having financial troubles. Thomas Cole (1801–1848) is generally accepted as the founder of the Hudson River School of landscape painting, and is one of the founding fathers of American landscape painting. “View of Round-Top in the Catskill Mountains,”1827, by Thomas Cole (1801–1848). After his return, he lived and worked chiefly in Catskill, keeping up with art activity in New York primarily through Durand. Fig. Thomas Cole was the first of the Hudson River School of painters, often characterized as being the first native American school of painting. Dunlap publicized the discovery of the new talent, and Cole was welcomed into New York’s cultural community, which included the poet and editor William Cullen Bryant and the author James Fenimore Cooper. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Gift of Edith Cole Silberstein; National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, about Young America: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Inventories of American Painting and Sculpture, Art Bridges + Terra Foundation Initiative, Young America: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Subsiding of the Waters of the Deluge, The Pilgrim of the Cross at the End of His Journey (study…, The Pilgrim of the World at the End of His Journey (study…, Using the Nam June Paik Archive - Access and Hours, Highlights from the Nam June Paik Archive, Online Resources for Researching Nam June Paik, Publication Requests for the Nam June Paik Archive. Colonel John Trumbull, already renowned as the painter of the American Revolution, saw Cole’s pictures and instantly purchased one, recommending the other two to his colleagues William Dunlap and Asher B. Durand. In 2014, friezes painted by Cole on the walls of his home, but which had been decorated over, were discovered. Cole had taught himself to sketch and paint, and worked for a time painting portraits in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and even Ohio. The artist’s marriage brought with it increasing religious piety manifested in the four-part series The Voyage of Life (1840). The Arcadian or Pastoral State. In the early 1800’s, scientists still believed that natural geology could be explained as effects of the Flood. Shall the spirit, that mysterious principle, unknown even to itself, that vivifies this earth, and generates these thoughts, sink also into the gloomy gulf of nonexistence, nor feel again created Beauty, nor see the Nature that it loved so much? As a young artist [Thomas] Cole roamed the Hudson River valley and the region around the Catskill and Adirondack mountains, making sketches of the shrubs, trees, rocks, and waterfalls that he later incorporated into his own imaginative compositions to depict the look and feel of America’s wilderness. According to some accounts, the first fourteen years of Thomas’ life were spent in great misery. The region around Rome, along with the classical myth, also inspired The Titan’s Goblet (1833). There are no fallacies with God. The present autumnal scene is likely derived from a sketch made during this trip. He entered the work force as a textile printer and wood engraver in Philadelphia. The full text of the article is here →, National Academy Museum and School (National Academy of Design), New York City, NY, US, The Course of Empire: The Consummation of the Empire. Disclaimer: www.Thomas-Cole.com is a personal website covering the career of Thomas Cole, but is in no way an official website for Thomas Cole and www.Thomas-Cole.com does not claim to be that in any way. Speaking more broadly, a whole sweep of 20th-century North-American art, from Precisionism to Land Art, might be seen to have inherited something of the grand scale and ambition of Cole's work. Nora Panzer American Landscapes: 19th-Century Selections (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, n.d.). In 1825 he sold three landscape paintings and that summer he took his first sketching trip up the Hudson River. Trumbull was especially impressed with the work of the young artist and sought him out, bought one of his paintings, and put him into contact with a number of his wealthy friends including Robert Gilmor of Baltimore and Daniel Wadsworth of Hartford, who became important patrons of the artist. His only pupil was his neighbor in Catskill, Frederic Church. What Trumbull recognized in the work of the young painter was the perception of wildness inherent in American scenery that landscape artists had theretofore ignored. Returning to New York, he displayed five landscapes in the window of William Colman's bookstore; according to the New York Evening Post the two views of Cold Spring were purchased by Mr. A. Seton, who lent them to the American Academy of the Fine Arts annual exhibition in 1826. A migrant who arrived at the age of 17 in 1818, he was taught by an itinerant portrait painter, and in 1825 helped found the National Academy of Design in New York City. Thomas Cole did an excellent job in portraying realism in his paintings. In this sense, his paintings capture not only the character of American culture during the mid-19th century but perhaps something more enduring about the open and expansive quality of that culture. Thomas Cole was born on February 1, 1801 in Bolton, Lancashire, England. He also painted The Garden of Eden (1828), with lavish detail of Adam and Eve living amid waterfalls, vivid plants, and deer. Cole's work is known for its romantic portrayal of the American wilderness. These types of hallmarks can be used … The Estate of Thomas Cole and their presence hold all necessary copyrights and licences for all of his paintings and other works. His first pupil, in 1844, was the landscape artist, Frederic E. Church. In addition to his landscape scenes, he produced three series of monumental paintings that expressed his Christian faith and the role of religion in the cycles of human history. Cole was the founder of the Hudson River School, which was a group of landscape painters … Asher Brown Durand’s “Kindred Spirits,” from 1849, is a tribute to his friend and mentor Thomas Cole, upon his death in 1848. The canvas expresses the untamed spirit of the waterfall that so impressed Cole. He continued to produce American and foreign landscape subjects of incredible beauty, including the Mountain Ford (1846). He is regarded as the founder of the Hudson River School, an American art movement that flourished in the mid-19th century. Cole received rudimentary instruction from an itinerant artist, began painting portraits, genre scenes, and a few landscapes, and set out to seek his fortune through Ohio and Pennsylvania. Keep in touch by subscribing to news and updates from SAAM and Renwick Gallery. In 1825 he moved to New York City and made many sketching trips up the Hudson River and into the Catskills. All public programs are online only, on-site public tours and events are currently suspended. At first glance, The Oxbow and The Consummation of Empire, two masterpieces by Thomas Cole prominently featured in the exhibition Thomas Cole's Journey: Atlantic Crossings, seem entirely unrelated paintings, both in subject and content. No! Cole found work early on as an engraver. But whereas younger American painters such as Albert Bierstadt had come into direct contact with The Düsseldorf School of painting, and thus with the tradition in which they placed themselves, Cole was largely self-tutored, representing something of the archetypal American figure of the auto-didact.In many ways, Cole's art epitomizes all contradictions of European settler culture in America. Not only did Thomas Cole paint the lush mountain landscapes that inspired the Hudson River School art movement of the 19th century, he also painted on the walls of his home. Throughout the subsequent years, he continued to worry about selling his paintings. Thus an intimate record of the viewpoint and activities of this gentle, pious, articulate, and reflective man is available through Louis Noble’s books. In 1842 he joined the Anglican Church. The south wind, I thought, would still continue to blow, and bring up its dark clouds for ages after my works, and all the reputation I might gain had faded away, and become as though they had never been— swept by the wing of time into oblivion’s gulf. Although he achieved considerable success from his straightforward depictions of American scenery, his greater ambition was to convey the word of God through sublime landscapes. He also kept a journal and wrote lengthy letters to his wife, friends, and patrons. One of Cole’s sisters was Sarah Cole, who was also a landscape painter. 2. From a modern perspective, Cole's Eurocentric gaze on seemingly empty wildernesses which had, in fact, been populated for centuries, also seems troubling; where Native Americans do appear in his work, as in Falls of the Kaaterskill (1826), it is as picturesque flecks rather than characterized participants in the scene.Cole's legacy is evident in the work of future American artists who advanced the Hudson River style, including his student Frederic Edwin Church, Albert Bierstadt, Jasper Cropsey, Asher B. Durand, George Inness, John Kensett, and Thomas Moran. Like [Washington] Allston and [Albert Pinkham] Ryder, Cole wrote poetry. Cole painted and exhibited a replica of the series in Rome, where he returned in 1841–42, traveling south to Sicily. During this time, a number of Cole letters and poems were published in New York papers and magazines. And shall it be? … The National Gallery of Art serves the nation by welcoming all people to explore and experience art, creativity, and our shared humanity. Born in 1801, Thomas Cole and his family moved to America from Britain, the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, in the early 19 th century. The Great American Hall of Wonders is a vividly illustrated survey of the American ingenuity that energized all aspects of nineteenth-century society, from the painting of landscapes and scenes of everyday life to the planning of scientific expedition and the development of new mechanica. Cole influenced his artistic peers, especially Asher B. Durand and Frederic Edwin Church, who studied with Cole from 1844 to 1846. In this post I will be taking a closer look at 'The Oxbow' by Thomas Cole. Though devoted to the study of nature, and usually thought of as a landscape artist, moralistic and religious themes were central to Cole’s paintings. As a public health precaution due to COVID-19, all Smithsonian museums are closed temporarily beginning November 23. He traveled around the country, creating signs and portraits in exchange for lodgings, then returned to Pennsylvania to study at the Academy of the Fine Arts. Smithsonian American Art Museum and Renwick Gallery. He was trained by an itinerant portrait painter named Stein and then spent two years at the Pennsylvania Academy of The National Gallery of Art and Sculpture Garden are temporarily closed. Born in Bolton le Moors, Lancashire, in 1801, Cole emigrated with his family to the United States in 1818, settling in Steubenville, Ohio. Cole's work is known for its romantic portrayal of the American wilderness. His father worked as a woollen manufacturer and regularly had to relocate for better employment opportunities. During the 1830s, as Cole was painting his Course of Empires series, he was harboring gravely pessimistic thoughts about America, lamenting in his journal that he feared the end of democracy. All his paintings are romantic in vein, for Cole felt it his duty to depict nature, especially American nature, as the “visible hand of God.” From 1829 to 1832 Cole traveled abroad, but his unique genius was not affected by Old World contacts. Born in Bolton-le-Moors, Lancashire, England, in 1801, at the age of seventeen he emigrated with his family to the United States, first working as a wood engraver in Philadelphia before going to Steubenville, Ohio, where his father had established a wallpaper manufacturing business. Thomas Cole: Finding the Muse. Cole was primarily a painter of landscapes, but he also painted allegorical works. Bonus Download: Before diving into this post, make sure you grab my free Landscape Painting Starter Kit. Thomas Cole was born on February 1, 1801, in the town of Bolton-le-Moor in Lancashire, England, into the family of James Cole, a woolen manufacturer, and his wife Mary. Learn more. Thomas Cole (February 1, 1801 – February 11, 1848) was an English-born American painter known for his landscape and history paintings. Fine Art / Getty Images. Cole’s family immigrated first to Philadelphia and then settled in Steubenville, Ohio. For instance, Thomas Cole did not always sign his works. In it, a river journey represents the human passage through life to eternal reward. It cannot be. He traveled around the country, creating signs and portraits in exchange for lodgings, then returned to Pennsylvania to study at the Academy of the Fine Arts. Thomas Cole (1801–1848) was a British-born American artist and the founder of the … A flow of melancholy thoughts and feelings overwhelmed me for a time. The exhibition Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings takes a new look at the artist and his legacy, and in the process, rethinks the emergence of landscape painting in the United States in the nineteenth century in a global context. As was typical, he did not execute the painting directly from nature; his letters indicate that he finished it in London the following year. This garnered Cole the attention of John Trumbull, Asher B. Durand, and William Dunlap. Cole sold his first five paintings made from this sketching trip, and became a founding member of the National Academy of Design in 1826 (Ellwood Parry, The Art of Thomas Cole: Ambition and Imagination, Newark, 1988, pp. The Leader of the Luddites, 1812. By 1829, his success enabled him to take the Grand Tour of Europe and especially Italy, where he remained in 1831–32, visiting Florence, Rome, and Naples. Cole also continued to paint, with ever-rising technical assurance, sublime American scenes such as the View from Mount Holyoke (1836), The Oxbow (1836), in which he included a portrait of himself painting the vista and View on the Catskill—Early Autumn (1836-1837), in which he pastorally interpreted the prospect of his beloved Catskill Mountains from the village of Catskill, where he had moved the year before and met his wife-to-be, Maria Bartow. In 1844, Cole welcomed into his Catskill studio the young Frederic Church, who studied with him until 1846 and went on to become the most renowned exponent of the generation that followed Cole. He had seven sisters. He helped America vision a society with possibilities, opportunities, and abundance of resources. Cole's work is known for its romantic portrayal of the American wilderness. Among the paintings was a landscape called View of Fort Ticonderoga from Gelyna. Immigrant Thomas Cole used landscape painting to express the hopes of a young America. Cole believed that the wilderness of the ​“New World” held God’s promise for a new beginning. Thomas Cole's "The Course of Empire - Consummation," 1836, oil on canvas, 51 × 76 in, New York Historical Society. How contagious is gloom! Cole spent the years 1829 to 1832 and 1841 to 1842 abroad, mainly in England and Italy. : University Art Museum, 1972). In 1826 he was elected to the National Academy of Design. His family moved along with him. Thomas Cole was an English-born American painter who founded the Hudson River School.The artist’s light-filled panoramic scenes often contained biblical or literary subjects, as seen in his pious series of paintings The Voyage of Life (1840). He soon moved on to Philadelphia to pursue his art, inspired by paintings he saw at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Based on his sketches there, he executed three landscapes that a city bookseller agreed to display in his window. He incorporated allegory and symbolism in his works to convey … Thomas Cole (February 1, 1801 – February 11, 1848) was an English-born American painter known for his landscape and history paintings. Cole and his followers, who comprised a group that later became known as the Hudson River School, created a variety of styles to record, with pride and fidelity to nature, the unique, romantic qualities of the American scene. Thomas Cole was born on February 1, 1801, in Bolton, Lancashire, England, to Mary and James Cole.