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Thomas Cole
Bolton-le-Moor, great brItain, 1801-Catskill, New York, 1848
Although British by birth, Thomas Cole was one of the leading representatives of the American Romantic painting and the father of the so-called Hudson River School. This school, which began after Independence, fully established American painting as a national school, distancing it from the English influence which had dominated up to that point.
On his arrival in America at the age of seventeen, Cole earned a living as an engraving and a travelling portrait painter. After a short period of studies in the School of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, he began to paint from life in a self-taught manner. In 1825 he moved to New York and the summer of that same year made his first journey as an artist along the banks of the Hudson River whose landscape was to be the subject of his paintings from that time onwards. Cole aimed to create "an elevated style of landscape" which had a moral content comparable to that of history painting. He painted different versions of the same landscape, exploring its different moods which he conveyed not only through his painting but also through the poetry which he wrote throughout his life.
In the late 1820s he painted various biblical subjects such as Saint John
the Baptist in the Desert (Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford), The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Garden of Eden (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), The Garden of Eden (Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth), and Expulsion. Moon and Firelight (Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid).
Following three years travelling in England and Italy, Cole returned to New York in late 1832 and received his first important commission, for the series The Course of the Empire, a symbolic treatment of the origins, rise and fall of a nation, a project which he completed in 1836, the year in which he definitively settled in Catskill. He dedicated the remainder of his career to painting allegorical landscapes, a notable example of which is The Journey of Life (National Gallery of Art, Washington). His symbolic and spiritual landscapes influenced American Romantic landscape painting throughout the nineteenth century, also laying the way for the realist "plein air" painting which would develop in America from 1850.
Kelly, F.: Thomas Cole's Paintings of Eden. Exhibition catalogue Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, 1994.
Novak, B.: The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection. Nineteenth Century American Painting. London, 1986.
Powell III, Earl A.: Thomas Cole. New York, 1990.
Truettner, W. H. and Wallach, A. (eds.): Thomas Cole. Landscape into History. London-Washington, 1994.
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