COLE, Thomas

This enigmatic painting of visionary character is probably a version of another work by the artist, entitled The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden (now in Boston). It depicts the same landscape without the figures.

Born in England, Thomas Cole emigrated to the then British colony of North America when he was 17 and took up a career as a painter, specializing in landscapes and portraits. From 1825 he lived in New York, where he soon gained a reputation as a landscape painter, particularly after a trip along the Hudson River, which he undertook to paint in a number of canvases. This was the start of the Hudson River School which Cole founded and which attracted other artists such as Durand and Church, who worked in a similar style. Cole’s generation initiated a truly American style of painting, which developed for the first time in the 19th century and which focused on landscape, genre painting and still-life.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, American landscape painters of the Late Romantic school often suffused their compositions with an unreal illumination intended to symbolize Christian salvation. Their aim was to evoke the transcendence of light as a sign of divine mercy. Expanses of sky over a broad horizon were rendered in intense reds, yellows and violets, a colour range unknown to European painting, in spite of William Turner.

Thomas Cole, an emigrant from England who founded the Hudson River School, transformed Claude Lorrain’s arcadias into a vision of America.

Cole called Turner the prince of evil spirits, and he sought a form of expression for his megalomanic visions that at first sight looks more peaceful. In this painting the excessive size of the capital, on which the architect has reclined in reflection, only becomes clear on closer inspection. However, the reversal of the real conditions is intrinsically threatening, and this is hardly more peaceful than Turner’s chaos.

It was in America, still in the first flush of independent nationhood and democratic pride, that one of the most impressive of the prophetic meditations on historical inevitability was painted in the Romantic period. His five-part allegory The Course of Empire (1834-36), and its accompanying printed descriptions, carried a cautionary message for his own people. In its central picture, The Consummation of Empire, the hero returning from some glorious war is an allusion to President Andrew Jackson, whose divisive and arbitrary leadership was said by his opponents to make him a modern Caesar, preparing the way for destructive internal conflict.

This painting is as fantastic as it is surreal.

The compositional structure of this painting might recall earlier universal landscapes, were it not for a disturbing factor. On a rocky plateau projecting into the picture like a crossbar rises a huge stone goblet whose shaft consists of a gigantic primordial tree and whose base and rim are overgrown with forests interspersed with ancient settlements. The goblet is filled with water that serves tiny sailboats as a landlocked sea. It creates the impression of being a relic of the age of titans, who, according to Greek myth, populated the earth before men and gods.

Known as the father of the Hudson River School of landscape painters, Thomas Cole holds a prominent place in the history of American painting, both for the quality of his own work and for the influence he exerted over a generation of painters. At once a realist and a romantic, Cole infused America’s natural scenery with a sense of sublime grandeur. He was fascinated by the oxbow formation of the Connecticut River below Mount Holyoke, Massachusetts, and produced this magnificent panorama of the valley just after a thunderstorm. He depicted himself at work in the foreground.

The artist was fascinated by the oxbow formation of the Connecticut River below Mount Holyoke, Massachusetts, and produced this magnificent panorama of the valley just after a thunderstorm. He depicted himself at work in the foreground.