Thomas Cole

Thomas Cole. This image and all others on this page courtesy of artrenewal.org.

Thomas Cole 1801-1848 was not the first American landscape painter, Thomas Birch and Thomas Doughty both preceded him. But he was the first to be a landscape "superstar" and before he died young and unexpectedly, influenced an entire generation of landscape painters and started the Hudson River school. His only actual student was Fredrick Church.

Cole immigrated from Lancashire England as a young man and worked in his family's wallpaper block printing business. Seeing landscape paintings in Philadelphia by the aforementioned Doughty and Birch in the early 1820s Cole set out to be a painter. What was new and non European that he brought to American painting was the idea of the sublimity of the wilderness. The Europeans painted the civilized landscape, nature as mans garden.

The Mt. Washington valley in New Hampshire

We are so used to the idea of unspoiled and sublimely beautiful nature today that we are unaware what a strange idea that was then. Nature was thought of as dangerous, infested heathen savages and in need of "improvement". A generation of thinkers. poets and writers like Thoreau and Emerson invented the idea of beautiful nature that was "wild" and unspoiled. An entire generation of painters fanned out from New York in imitation of Cole to paint the American wilderness, At first they went mostly to New Hampshire and up the Hudson river. But later they ventured to the American West and South America.

Mt. Chocorua, I have stood in this place and can tell you that Cole did some very serious designing and rearranging of this location. I will be painting there again soon. Below is Coles' best known painting "The Oxbow, Northampton Mass.

Paintings in this era were of course made from drawings done on location. The Hudson river painters lived in New York city and took summer sketching trips to get material to turn into paintings over the winter in the city.

Cole took several trips to Italy and did this and a number of other wonderful paintings there. When he returned he added a form of classical allegory landscapes to his repertoire. The seem to me very dated and I don't see them as being the forebearers of anything that followed them in American painting.

A generation of young painters idolized Cole and they formed a "school " of American landscape painting, I will discuss them over the next few days.

Above is a painting of the Catskill mountain house an early resort hotel in the Adirondacks. I have visited this location also, the hotel is long gone, but the view is absolutely unbelievable. It is now a state park. Below is one of the Italian views.

Below is one of his allegorical landscapes, this one is the expulsion from the garden of Eden.

Tomorrow I will advance the story to the Hudson River school and the flowering of a unique American landscape tradition.