Thomas Cole (1801-1848)
American

Cole is considered by many the founders of Romantic landscape painting in America. His family moved from England to the U.S in 1818, where the 17 year-old Cole was trained in drawing and wood engraving. He spent some years in Steubenville designing patterns and probably also engraving woodblocks for his father's wallpaper firm. He made his first landscape paintings after learning the basis of oil painting from a itinerant portraitist called Stein. In 1823 he joined the Philadelphia Academy of Art. Later he co-founded the Hudson River School, the main school of Romantic landscape painting in USA. In 1829 and in 1841-42 Cole traveled to England, Switzerland, Italy and studied the landscape of Europe's best painters. In Europe, his visits to the great galleries of London and Paris and, overall, his travel in Italy from 1831 to 1832, fueled his imagination with high-minded themes and ideas, and he developed a strong, true Romantic spirit. The second trip to Europe, in 1841-42, provided even greater advances in the mastery of his power: his use of color showed more virtuosity and his shaping of atmosphere, especially the sky, became more luminous. When he came back, Cole revolutionized painting in America, due to his new knowledge and philosophical experiences. The innovations he presented to the new world include the symbolic, moral landscape, as represented by the series on the themes of The Course of Empire (1832; New York, Historical Society) and The Voyage of Life (1839/40; Utica, Munson William Proctor Institute), The Course of Empire: The Savage State (1836), The Voyage of Life: Childhood (1842). In these fantastic, symbolic scenes Cole infused strange effects of grandiose space and theatrical light contrasts. Cole also used antique and biblical subjects, increasing fantastic and mystical feelings in his paintings. His late pictures do not have the fine quality of his earlier atmospheric landscapes, they are raw and primitive, but they're able to stun spectators with extremely strong surrealism. Though Cole's unexpected death after a short illness sent a shock in New York and in art world, that can only thank many achievements that he provided, building a firm ground for the continued improvement of the school of American landscape.

Works

The Course of Empire: The Savage State. 1836. Oil on canvas. The New York Historical Society, NY, USA.
Expulsion from the Garden of Eden. c.1827-1828. Oil on canvas. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, USA.
View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm (the Oxbow). 1836. Oil on canvas. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA.
The Clove, Catskills. c.1827. Oil on canvas. New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut, USA.