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The nineteenth century saw the development of a type of painting which came to be called the “Hudson River School.” One of the founders and greatest painters in the Hudson River School was Thomas Cole.
Thomas Cole was born in Bolton-le-Moors, Lancashire, England in 1801. His family immigrated to America when he was 17. Cole probably learned the basics of oil painting from an itinerant portrait artist named John Stein, and in addition spent two years at the Pennsylvania School of Fine Arts. He first exhibited in New York, where painter Asher B. Durand and Colonel John Trumbull saw his work and found patrons for him.
In the nineteenth century there were several ways artists sold their work. Some artists worked on commission, in which case a person, called a patron, would hire them to paint a certain scene or portrait. These patrons often provided money for artists to travel, particularly in Italy, Greece or France. European travel was considered essential to an artist’s development and training. In addition, artists could make work that was not specifically commissioned, and put that work in shows or galleries where people would see the work, and possibly purchase it. After purchasing several of Cole’s paintings from the gallery where he was exhibiting, George W. Bruen paid for Cole’s first trip up the Hudson River, the area he and other painters would return to so frequently in their work that they became known as the Hudson River School.
The Hudson River School consisted of a group of artists that painted romantic landscapes of the northeast portion of the United States, particularly around the Hudson River area. Cole is considered a founder of this group and the style of landscape painting the Hudson River School artists were famous for. Cole painted American landscapes, and argued for the unique place American scenery had in the world.
In the nineteenth century America was searching for an identity. A young, untested nation, an “experiment in democracy,” it needed a way to show the world its uniqueness and value. One way Americans could assert the validity and power of their nation was through paintings that argued for America’s unique scenery. Cole’s powerful landscapes showed aspects of America such as mountains, forests, and waterfalls that did not exist in the same form in Europe.
In his “Essay on American Scenery” Cole praises the value of landscape itself, extolling the spirituality inherent in the beauty of scenery. Nature was inseparable from religion, according to Cole. He himself was active in the Episcopal Church. Cole was married in St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Catskill, in 1836. Cole married Maria Bartow, the niece of John Alexander from whom Cole rented a summer studio in 1834. Both Cole and his wife were baptized at St. Luke’s several years into their marriage. He was also the primary architect in the rebuilding of St. Luke’s after it was destroyed by fire, and a delegate to an Episcopal convention in New York.
Cole criticized the march of modern society, accusing people of losing their regard for “simplicity and beauty.” In his “Essay on American Scenery” Cole states, “the spirit of our society is to contrive but not to enjoy--toiling to produce more toil--accumulating in order to aggrandize.” It is not surprising that much of Cole’s work celebrates nature, and often has a theme of the underlying power of the natural world.
When people appear in Cole’s paintings they are dwarfed by the immensity of nature. Some of Cole’s most famous and renown works include the paintings in the series entitled “The Course of Empire,” which shows the rise and fall of a civilization. The last painting in this series is an image of trees and plants springing up around the ruins of the fallen empire--nature reclaiming the landscape.
Thomas Cole died in 1848 in Catskill, New York after several months of poor health. He contributed a unique way of showing American scenery. He provided a large body of work arguing for the value of landscape, specifically in the United States. After his death he was memorialized in a painting by Asher Durand and continues to be remembered by painters and lovers of American art.
Works Cited:
Cole, Thomas. Thomas Cole : Landscape Into History. Ed. by William H. Truettner and Alan
Wallach. New Haven : Washington, D.C. : Yale University Press ; National Museum of
American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1994.
Cole, Thomas. “Essay on American Scenery” 1838. Reprinted in McCoubrey, American Art
1700-1960: Sources and Documents: New York: Prentice Hall, 1966, 98-109.
Stebbins, Theodore E. The Lure of Italy: American Artists and the Italian Experience, 1760-1914.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 1992.
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