Age of Revolution
Thomas Cole (1801–1848)
American Hudson River School painter.
Thomas Cole founded the Hudson River School and gave American landscape a moral program. Born in 1801 at Bolton-le-Moors in Lancashire, he emigrated with his family to the United States in 1818, worked as an itinerant portraitist, and in 1825 — sketching along the Hudson and in the Catskills — found the subject that made him. His early wilderness views, shown in New York, were hailed as the first native landscape school.
Cole was never only a topographer. In the 1830s he painted allegorical cycles: 'The Course of Empire' (1833–36), five canvases tracing a civilization from savage state to luxury, destruction, and desolation; and 'The Voyage of Life' (first series 1839–40; a second series 1842). His 1835 'Essay on American Scenery' argued that the New World's wilderness was a providential gift, already vanishing under the axe. He taught Frederic Edwin Church at Catskill in the mid-1840s.
He died at Catskill in 1848, not yet forty-eight. Ellwood C. Parry's monograph remains the standard account of his ambition: landscape as sermon, nation, and memory.
The words the record keeps using: moral, romantic, allegorical, wilderness-haunted, didactic, sublime.
At a glance
- Lived 1801–1848
- Origin American
- Worked in New York
- Era Age of Revolution
- Movements Hudson River School
- Mediums Oil on canvas
- Techniques Chiaroscuro, Atmospheric perspective
Works in the archive
- View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm — The Oxbow, 1836 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
From Mount Holyoke, a storm still hangs over wild hills at left while the Connecticut River's oxbow and a settled, sunlit valley occupy the right. Cole includes himself at a foreground easel. Painted the same year he… - The Course of Empire: The Consummation of Empire, 1836 (New-York Historical Society)
The third canvas of Cole's five-part Course of Empire shows an imagined ancient city at the height of luxury: marble colonnades, a harbor packed with ships, a procession, and a statue-cluttered waterfront under a hard… - The Voyage of Life: Youth, 1842 (National Gallery of Art, Washington)
In the second picture of Cole's Voyage of Life (1842 National Gallery series), a youth takes the tiller of a flower-wreathed boat and points toward a luminous castle in the sky, while his guardian angel remains on the…
What was said
In his Essay on American Scenery Cole argued that the New World's wilderness was a distinctive, providential subject — already being lost to the axe — and that landscape could form the nation's taste and morals.
Cole designed The Course of Empire as a five-part moral history of a civilization — from savage state through pastoral calm and luxury to destruction and desolation — a warning against imperial pride, painted for Luman Reed.
The Voyage of Life pictures the soul's passage as a river journey — childhood, youth, manhood, old age — with landscape changing as the voyager's hope and peril change; Cole painted two full series and wrote explanations of the allegory.
Lineage
Passed on to Frederic Edwin Church
What would Thomas make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Thomas Cole", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Thomas · Keep a life moment the way Thomas would · Pictures made after Thomas