Thomas Cole
Thomas Cole, the father of the nineteenth-century American Hudson River School of Art movement, was actually English. Cole was born in 1801 in Lancashire, England. At 14 years old, he started an apprenticeship with an engraver. In 1817, he had moved to Liverpool, England, and became an engraver’s assistant.
In 1818, at 17 years of age, he moved with his family to the United States. He spent some time in Philadelphia working as an engraver and textile designer. His family had moved beyond Philadelphia in their search for work. In 1819, after a brief stint in St. Eustatius in the West Indies, Cole soon followed them, settling in with his family in Steubenville Ohio, where he worked in the wallpaper business. In 1820, Stein, a traveling artist, passed through Steubenville, he befriended Cole, and taught him the basics of painting. He began painting portraits for money, as that was a lucrative career, but he soon shifted his focus to landscapes.
In 1823, at 22 years old, Cole moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Although he had no formal art training, he was well-read on the subject. A landscape of his was even displayed at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts. In 1825, Thomas Cole moved to New York City. Several of his pieces were bought by George W. Bruen, who financed a trip upstate to the Catskill Mountain and Hudson River Valley. Cole fell in love with the area, which soon became a favorite subject for his work. In 1832, he formally moved his studio to the Town of Catskill in Upstate New York. This would be his home for the rest of his life.
Cole’s work is known for its realistic, yet romanticized depictions of untamed and wild American scenery. During the height of industrialization, when the natural world of the northeast United States was quickly disappearing, Cole wanted to portray and document the wild beauty before it was obliterated. Cole preferred straight landscapes, but when he did include figures in his landscape, they were dominated by the grandeur of the surrounding landscape.
Cole, like most people, first heard of Kaaterskill Falls in the Catskill Mountains in Washington Irving’s story, Rip Van Winkle, published in 1819. The main character lives in the Catskill Mountains which Irving so lovingly described. Rip Van Winkle encountered Kaaterskill Falls after waking up from his long sleep. While searching out the amphitheater where he encountered the strange little men the night before, Rip Van Winkle instead found this: “The rocks presented a high, impenetrable wall, over which the torrent came tumbling in a sheet of feathery foam, and fell into a broad deep basin, black from the shadows of the surrounding forest.”
The Rip Van Winkle story inspired Cole, and a new wave of tourists, to head upstate and seek the land that Irving had described. In 1925, Cole ventured upstate for the first time. The paintings he created after that excursion were received well and were featured on the cover of the New York Evening Post. In 1826, when he was 26 years old, Cole went on another trip to upstate New York. It was financed by his patron, George W. Bruen. At the time Cole painted this, the Kaaterskill Falls in upstate New York, were already a known tourist destination for those living in New York City. This same year, Cole created at least three paintings of Kaaterskill Falls, including “Kaaterskill Falls”, “From the Top of Kaaterskill Falls”, and “The Falls of Kaaterskill”.
During the 1830s, Cole traveled to Europe to study the masters. Upon his return, he started to incorporate large-scale allegorical works into his repertoire that were often a series of paintings. Cole became quite popular among artists of his day. He was having financial troubles and took on Frederic Edwin Church as a pupil to increase his income. Church would go on to become one of the top painters of the Hudson River School of Art. He taught several classes at the National Academy of Design in New York City, and had several prominent artists as pupils, including George Inness.
Thomas Cole died suddenly in 1848 at the age of 47. He made a lasting impression on his peers and students, including artist Asher B. Durand. The Hudson River School of Art, developed from his style, became very popular during the mid to late nineteenth century.
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