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Thomas Cole
(Feb.1, 1801, Lancashire - Feb.11,1848, Catskill, N.Y.) American Oil Painting Artist Biography.
Thomas Cole was a American Romantic landscape painter and a founder of the Hudson River School style of oil painting. His family immigrated to America from England in 1819 and he became passionately devoted to the natural scenery of his new country. Inspired by paintings he saw at the Pennsylvania Academy during a stay in Philadelphia from 1823 to 1825, Cole became dedicated to a career as a landscape oil painter. He spent two years at the Academy of Fine Arts in Pennsylvania and made his living as a portrait oil painter and engraver there and in New York until some of his landscape oil paintings attracted the attention of Dunlap,Trumbull and Asher B.Durand in 1825. Direct, spontaneous landscapes painted in the wilderness of the Catskill Mountains brought rapid recognition and attracted New York buyers The Clove, Catskills (1827).
From this time until the end of his career, Thomas Cole enjoyed fame as a pre-eminent American landscape oil painter and created works that influenced a generation of artists who followed his lead in focusing on the sublime beauty and grandeur of the wilderness. In the following year he moved to Catskill on the Hudson River, journeying into the mountains often on foot to make sketches of the scenery and working his studies up into finished oil paintings in his studio. In 1829, Cole became one of the founding members of the National Academy of Design.
In 1829 and again in 1841 Cole traveled to Europe, he visited England, Switzerland and Italy, studying in particular the landscapes of European masters. He came under the influence of J.M. William Turner and changed to oil painting grandiose themes. On his return, having also absorbed philosophical and literary ideas, Cole introduced a new type of painting to America, the symbolic, moral landscape, as represented by the series in The Course of Empire (1832; New York Historical Society) Five paintings depicting wilderness The Course of Empire: The Arcadian to luxurious state The Course of the Empire: The Consummation to a condition of corruption and destruction The Course of the Empire: The Savage State and finally to dissolution The Course of the Empire: Desolation.
These are fantastic, symbolic scenes full of unusual effects of grandiose space and theatrical contrasts of light. Not satisfied with great American nature any longer, Cole increases fantastic and mystical character by introducing Biblical and antique subjects. His late pictures do not attain the fine quality of his earlier atmospheric landscapes, they are rough and primitive, but are supposed to stun spectators with extremely pretentious surrealism.
Although his only student was the painter Frederic Edwin Church, Cole had an influential role in the New York art community, and fostered the careers of many Hudson River School artists. Cole's unexpected death in 1848 at the young age of 47 was deeply mourned. Thomas Cole is considered the father of American Romantic landscape oil painting and therefore one of the worlds artist.
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The Clove, Catskills
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The Arcadian
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The Consummation
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The Savage State
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Desolation
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Frederic Edwin Church
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