His Early Days

Thomas Cole was born in 1801 at Bolton, Lancashire in Northwestern England. When he became 17 years of age, he migrated to the United States with his family. Before moving to Steubenville, Ohio, where his father had established a wallpaper manufacturing business, Thomas Cole worked as a wood engraver in Philadelphia.

As he was not happy with his occupation in his father’s business, Cole chose painting as his career and received basic training and instructions from an itinerant portraitist.

Cole’s Painting Skills

Cole nurtured the type of conviction usually reserved for religious beliefs. This turned Cole into a painstaking draftsman and a tireless hiker. America’s most respected literary figure had pronounced in 1820 that ‘he who would study nature in its wilderness and variety must plunge into the forest, must explore the glen, must stem the torrent and dare the precipice”.

In 1923, Cole began to make studies from nature. “Every morning before it was light, he was on his way to the beautiful Monongahela, with his papers and pencils. He made small but accurate studies of single objects; a tree, a leafless bough, and as the season advanced, he studied the foliage that clothes the naked trees”.

Admirer of Birch and Daughty

He had found the right path. What is extraordinary was that he had found the true mode of pursuing it. Cole could not have agreed more. Thereafter, he began painting portraits, genre scenes and landscapes and travelled to Ohio and Pennsylvania in search of subjects for honing his painting skills. Though his family had relocated to Pittsburg, Cole moved to Philadelphia as he was inspired by works of some of the famous paintings that he saw in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Cole admired the landscape of Thomas Birch and Thomas Daughty. These two artists were far more proficient than he at that point in time. Code became increasingly accomplished in his craftsmanship. He was full of ideas about the peculiar qualities of the American wilderness. He moved to New York City in spring 1825 and travelled up along the Hudson River to the easter Catskill Mountains.

The landscape around Hudson River

More than ever, Cole’s ambitions seemed attuned to the rising tides of American cultural Nationalism. Code stayed in the vicinity of Catskill Mountain House hotel. During his stay near and along the Hudson River, he made three landscapes based on the sketches of the river and the hills along its basin. While a city bookseller agreed to display in his window, Colonel John Trumbell, a renewed painter of the Americal Revolution, purchased one of his paintings instantly. He also recommended to other two of his colleagues, William Dunlap and Asher B Durand to buy Cole’s paintings.

Recognition among Cultural Community

Trumbull appreciated Cole’s perception of wilderness in the Amerian landscape which most other landscape artists had ignored. He placed the speciality of Cole’s paintings before several art patrons who began buying Cole’s work. Trumbull also portrayed Thomas Cole’s talent as a new discovery in the field of painting. This also helped Cole receive necessary publicity among New York’s cultural community. Thereafter, Cole became one of the founding members of the National Academy of Design at the young age of 21 years, in 1825.

Cole’s Italian Tour

Cole had developed a desire to take his painting to a higher level by including biblical and literary subjects in his landscapes. He was intending to widen the scope of his paintings by travelling more and adding newer subjects. By 1829, Thomas Cole had also earned a name in the field of art and had sufficient financial success that would enable him to take a tour of Europe, especially Italy in 1829. He stayed in Italy from 1831to 1832 and visited several cities such as Florance, Rome and Naples. Cole was a devout Protestant and his belief manifested itself in his early canvasses.

Famous Paintings

During this period, Cole, inspired by the region around Rome, painted many Italian subjects, such as View Near Tivoli (Morning), (1832), Titan’s Goblet (1833). His most ambitious historical landscape series The Course of Empire (1833-1836), is a series of five pictures dramatizing the rise and fall of an ancient classical state. Thomas Cole’s other famous paintings include View From Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, After a Thunderstorm- The Oxbow, View on the Catskill-Early Autumn (1836-37).

Attraction to Catskill

After his return from Italy and marriage to Maria Bartow, he stayed in the village of Catskill near his beloved Catskill mountains. Cole’s paintings made during this period started showing manifestations of his religious piety. His four-part series The Voyage of Life (1840) depicted the journey of a river as a symbolic representation of the human passage through life. He continued to produce American and foreign landscapes and the famous Mountain Ford (1846) is one among them.

“Niagara Falls”

Thomas Cole composed the romanticised and autumnal scene of Niagara Falls after visiting the falls in 1929. He portrayed the grandeur of Niagara Falls as a part of the American landscape. At the same time, Thomas Cole was much concerned about the impact of industrialisation and colonisation on the environment. Cole gave expression to his concern for the environment by omitting the factories and hotels that had come up in the area in the early 19th century. His painting also erased the human devastation wrought by colonialism and conquest in the region. Cole has painted two native American figures at the centre.

Inspiration to Young Generation Painters

Cole invited young Frederic Church to his Catskill studio in 1844 where Church studied with him until 1846 and went on to become one of the renowned painters among the generation to follow Cole. Cole started work on his most ambitious series, The Cross and the World in 1846. But in February 1948, he contracted pleurisy and died before completing the painting. Asher Brown Durand was another painter who travelled and sketched with Cole in the 1830s.

Durand became a famous landscape painter and ascended to the presidency of the National Academy of Design. He followed the example set by Thomas Cole and fostered a few other young-generation landscape artists. The second-generation Hudson River School painters followed, majorly, the painting style laid down by one of the greatest landscape painters in the art world, that is none other than Thomas Cole.