Too cool for art school Thomas Cole 12th sun painter

This time I picked an American artist that isn’t so well-known to Europeans but that was important to American art history: Thomas Cole.

Thomas Cole was born in 1801 in England but his family emigrated to America in 1818 to Ohio. At age 22 he moved to Philadelphia and at age 25 to Catskill, New York. He is important because he founded the Hudson River School, a group of painters in the 19th century that painted American landscape in an epic way. They were influenced by romanticism where the focus is on emotion and where nature is glorified. The group was named after the area where the first painters painted their works the Hudson river valley and surrounding areas like Catskill where Thomas Cole ended up living.

He found early on work as an engraver and got interested in painting. He was largely self-taught by books and studying other artists. At first he did portraits but later on his focus shifted to landscapes which is what he now is most known for.

He did many landscapes like this

but also paintings influenced by romantic poetry, classic literature and the bible

one of the best series of works he did was called the voyage of life where there are four allegoric paintings about the different stages in life: childhood, youth, manhood and old age.

Another nice one is a pair of a sunrise and sunset known as the departure and the return

Painting landscapes may not exactly sound revolutionary, but it wasn’t the norm at the time. history painting, portraits and genre painting were considered higher in hierarchy than landscape painting, animal painting and still-life’s. this was changing however. Artists like John Constable and JMW Turner and Aivazovsky for example challenged these ideas and managed to win the respect of the public and art critics anyway.

Romanticism suited America actually really well. It suited to young rebellious soul of the new world and it was in tune with what the Americans we’re doing at the time: exploring new places. Many places in America were still untamed and that was part of the beauty. Romanticism had a tendency to try and show nature in an epic way and that suited the American audience that were proud of wild beauty of their country. Cole and other River Hudson School painters sometimes expressed this by adding ruins to their landscape as to say that nature is stronger than empires. Empires eventually decline but nature always bounces back.