Thomas Cole
Thomas Cole
1801 - 1848
American painter and poet of English birth. Cole was the leading figure in American landscape painting during the first half of the 19th century and had a significant influence on the painters of the HUDSON RIVER SCHOOL, among them Jasper Cropsey, Asher B. Durand and Frederic Church (Cole’s only student). In the 1850s these painters revived the moralizing narrative style of landscape in which Cole had worked during the 1830s. From the 1850s the expressive, Romantic landscape manner of Cole was eclipsed by a more direct and objective rendering of nature, yet his position at the beginning of an American landscape tradition remained unchallenged (for an example of his work, see View on the Catskill—Early Autumn,1836–37; New York, Met.).
1. Early career, 1801–29.
He spent his first 17 years in Lancashire. Industrialized since the 18th century, Lancashire provided a stark contrast to the wilderness Cole encountered when he followed his family to Steubenville, OH, via Philadelphia, in 1820. To a greater extent than his American contemporaries, therefore, Cole sensed the fragility of the American wilderness, threatened by settlement and industry. Coming of age on a frontier, Cole was largely self-taught as an artist. The somewhat mythologized account of his life set forth by his friend, the minister Louis Noble, describes a youthful romantic in spiritual communion with nature, finding his vocation amid ‘the form and countenance, the colours, qualities and circumstances of visible nature’ (Noble, p. 12).
Cole’s earliest views of the American wilderness were fresh and direct, reinvigorating the worn conventions of the PICTURESQUE and the SUBLIME that shaped the work of the nation’s first landscape painters, Joshua Shaw, Alvan Fisher and Thomas Doughty. He surpassed the topographical tradition represented by British emigrant artists such as William Guy Wall, William James Bennett (1787–1844), William Birch (1755–1834) and his son Thomas Birch. Cole’s landscapes, exhibited for the first time in New York in 1825, brought him to the immediate attention of JOHN TRUMBULL, the patriarch of American history painting, and ASHER B. DURAND, who succeeded Cole as the most influential spokesman for landscape as a genre. The patronage of men such as DANIEL WADSWORTH of Hartford, CT, also helped establish Cole as an artist.
Cole’s early landscapes, such as Landscape with Tree Trunks (1827–8; Providence, RI Sch. Des., Mus. A.) or The Clove, Catskills (1827; New Britain, CT, Mus. Amer. A.), were suffused with the drama of weather and seasonal cycles and of natural flux, conditions through which the artist explored his own changing emotional states. Such concerns are evident not only in his painting, but also in the poetry that he wrote throughout his life. His verse and his diaries provide an essential gloss on his art and reveal in his thinking a strong literary and moralizing component that bound nature and imagination together in a complex and unstable unity.
In the late 1820s Cole turned to biblical themes, producing such paintings as St John the Baptist Preaching in the Wilderness (1827; Hartford, CT, Wadsworth Atheneum), the Garden of Eden (1828; Fort Worth, TX, Amon Carter Mus.), the Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden (1827–8; Boston, MA, Mus. F.A.) and the Subsiding of the Waters after the Deluge (1829; Washington, DC, N. Mus. Amer. A.). Among the influences on these works were the recently published mezzotints of JOHN MARTIN. Cole’s early mode of landscape painting was frequently associated with SALVATOR ROSA, with whose landscapes he was probably familiar. His Scene from ‘Last of the Mohicans’ (1827; Hartford, CT, Wadsworth Atheneum), of which there are several versions, was based on James Fenimore Cooper’s novel and was one of the earliest works of art inspired by American literature.
While Cole prepared the way for the plein-air naturalism that overtook American landscape painting of the 1850s, his own working methods were grounded in older attitudes. He frequently made precise outline drawings and studies carrying observations about distance and colour from nature and employed these as the sources for his studio compositions, modifying them to produce a synthetic approach to landscape. In certain instances Cole made preparatory oil sketches for such ambitious later series as The Voyage of Life. His palette varied from the dark brooding effects of his early Romantic landscapes to the more strident colours of certain works of the 1840s.
2. Later career, 1829–48.
Cole spent the years from 1829 to 1832 in England and Italy. During this period he painted the Roman Campagna in a manner suggestive of J. M. W. Turner’s influence. In Rome, however, while occupying the studio which, according to tradition, had been that of Claude Lorrain, Cole formulated the idea for his most ambitious series, The Course of Empire (1833–6; New York, NY Hist. Soc.). The generous patronage and friendship of LUMAN REED, a newly wealthy New York merchant, made such an extended effort possible for Cole, and the cycle of five paintings, exhibited in New York in 1836, did much to broaden his reputation.
A dramatic allegory, The Course of Empire traced the history of a great nation from its origins in nature and rise to imperial power through its subsequent conquest by invaders and final decline into oblivion. In constructing his series, Cole drew an analogy between ancient and modern republics that had been explored by such works as Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88) and later by English Romantic works such as Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18). The implied analogy with ancient Rome reflected Cole’s growing disillusionment with America’s cultural arrogance and what he felt was its unwitting re-enactment of previous historical cycles. The series also drew on diverse visual sources; for example, on popular panoramas such as Pandemonium by Robert Burford (1792–1861) and perhaps on catastrophic themes in the work of Turner, particularly in The Fifth Plague of Egypt (exh. RA, 1800; Indianapolis, IN, Mus. A.; engraved 1808).
Such didactic serial allegories consumed a large part of Cole’s energies during the remainder of his career, expressing his frustrations with the limits of pure landscape (e.g. The Titan’s Goblet, 1833; New York, Met.). In works such as Oxbow on the Connecticut River (1836; New York, Met.), Cole infused pure landscape with a dynamic sense of historical change. His increasing awareness of the clash between nature and culture is evident not only in his art, but also in his journals, poetry and correspondence. Such landscape views as Mt Aetna from Taormina (1843; Hartford, CT, Wadsworth Atheneum) sounded a characteristic note in Cole’s later work: culture’s impermanence measured by the standards of natural time. Pendant works such as The Departure and The Return (both 1837; Washington, DC, Corcoran Gal. A.) and The Past and The Present (both 1838; Amherst Coll., MA, Mead A. Mus.) express a sense of Romantic belatedness, as well as a fascination with the Middle Ages (an interest that linked Cole to the Gothic Revival movement in America during the 1830s and 1840s). These works also furnished the source for later allegorical or literary landscapes, such as JASPER F. CROPSEY’s Spirit of War (1853; Washington, DC, N.G.A.). Such ‘medieval’ themes constituted only half of Cole’s fascination with the past; equally compelling was the arcadian landscape of the Mediterranean world, evident in such works as Roman Campagna (1843; Hartford, CT, Wadsworth Atheneum), The Dream of Arcadia (1838; Denver, CO, A. Mus.) and L’Allegro (1845; Los Angeles, CA, Co. Mus. A.). In The Architect’s Dream (1840; Toledo, OH, Mus. A.), commissioned by the architect Ithiel Town, Cole juxtaposed Classical, Gothic and Egyptian styles in a fantastic architectural amalgam recalling the work of the English artist Joseph Michael Gandy.
In 1839, under the patronage of Samuel Ward, a prominent New York banker, Cole undertook another ambitious series, The Voyage of Life (1839–40; Utica, NY, Munson–Williams–Proctor Inst.; second version, 1841–2; Washington, DC, N.G.A.). A four-part allegory painted in the period of Cole’s conversion to the Episcopal Church, The Voyage of Life was a highly accessible series whose Christian theme of resignation appealed to popular sentiments. Engraved by the American Art-Union, it enjoyed a wide national circulation. Cole’s tale of youthful imperial visions followed by the sobering setbacks of maturity placed him once again at a philosophical remove from the aggressive expansionism of his contemporaries.
Following a second trip to Europe in 1841–2, Cole was drawn increasingly to Christian subjects; the most ambitious of these works, The Cross and the World, remained unrealized at his death. During these years his landscape style shifted towards more domesticated scenes, evident in such works as the Old Mill at Sunset (1844) and The Picnic (1846; both New York, Brooklyn Mus. A.). During the mid-1840s he also produced a series of paintings on the theme of the home in the woods, which nostalgically evoked the pioneer’s earlier more direct association with nature. Although he continued to paint occasional works reminiscent of his wilderness views of the 1820s (e.g Notch of the White Mountains, 1839; Washington, DC, N.G.A.; and Mountain Ford, 1846; New York, Met.), the pastoralized scenes he executed in the 1840s became the touchstone for American landscape painting over the next decade, as nature came to symbolize communal rather than spiritual and personal values.
Though Cole’s work showed no loss of artistic conviction in these years, such stylistic and thematic changes betoken his withdrawal from what he called ‘the daily strife’ of America in the 1840s into a religiously inspired vision of personal salvation. While he looked to art as an antidote to the rampant materialism of Americans, he nonetheless felt discouraged over the social role of artists and the opportunities for patronage available to them in a democratic culture. Cole remained at root culturally disenchanted, in search of a stability that he found only in private withdrawal and religion. Though he occasionally produced works with a broader cultural significance, such as his Prometheus Bound (1846–7; priv. col.), which symbolizes the subjugation of hubris by a transcendent power, Cole’s later career was dominated by a largely personal symbolism. Yet his friendships in the artistic and literary community were strong, and his sudden death in 1848 left a void in the artistic life of the nation. [Angela L. Miller. "Cole, Thomas." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 4, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T018539.]
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