Thomas Cole captured Nature in her grandest form, creating sublime landscapes of the untrammeled wilderness.
Born in Bolton, England, in 1801, Cole came of age witnessing the effects of the Industrial Revolution.
Rivers rotting with waste, factories belching smoke, and machinery destroyed in the Luddite rebellion
epitomized the new era.
While Cole's working life began in a British factory creating calico fabrics,
his father was forced to relocate the family to the United States due to financial hardship.
His early years as an economic migrant were Cole's "winter of discontent."
Yet brighter days were on the horizon.
"In my imagination I pictured the glory of being a great painter," he wrote.
With gusto, Cole moved to New York to become an artist.
He found early success traveling up the Hudson River to paint wild landscapes that were unmistakably American.
From New York, the 28-year-old Cole crossed the Atlantic once more.
"I'm going to study the great works of art," he wrote.
"I feel like one who is going to his first battle, and knows neither his strength nor his weakness."
In London, he studied the European masters—Claude, Turner, and Constable—
who impressed the artist and, in the process, strengthened his own hand.
"I think I shall improve very fast here, having the advantage of seeing so many fine pictures,
both ancient and modern."
From England, Cole ventured to Italy "in search of the picturesque."
He mastered the art of the on-site sketch, portraying the Colosseum in Rome and the surrounding
countryside of the Campagna.
Cole returned to New York in 1832.
The artist became keenly aware of the country's transformation under President Andrew Jackson
into a profit-seeking, land-grabbing, manufacturing machine.
His anxieties bled onto the canvas in two of his most renowned works,
The Oxbow and The Course of Empire, manifestos which posed a question to Americans:
Will the man-made forces of capitalism overwhelm the divine power of nature,
or is there a better path for our young nation?
Cole was a torchbearer who created a defining aesthetic for the new republic.
A man who loved to paint and painted what he loved, cherishing one subject above all.
He wrote, "I have found, though, no natural scenery yet which has affected me so powerfully
as that which I have seen in the wilderness places of America."
He would launch the first national landscape school in the young nation by imparting his
inspiration to generations of American artists.
"Nature has spread for us a rich and delightful banquet.
Shall we turn from it?
We are still in Eden; the wall that shuts us out of the garden is our own ignorance and folly."
The questions Cole posed in his art and in his writings continue to resonate today.
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