Thomas Cole
(American, 1801–1848)
Biography
Thomas Cole was an English-born American painter who founded the Hudson River School. The artist’s light-filled panoramic scenes often contained biblical or literary subjects, as seen in his pious series of paintings The Voyage of Life (1840). “The sky is the soul of all scenery. It makes the earth lovely at sunrise and splendid at sunset,” he once mused. “In the one it breathes over the earth a crystal-like ether, in the other a liquid gold.” Born on February 1, 1801 in Bolton, United Kingdom, he and his family emigrated to America when he was 17 years old. Soon after his arrival, Cole began painting portraits, genre scenes, and landscapes, leaving a job with his father’s business to pursue an art education in Philadelphia. Settling in New York in 1825, he fell into a milieu of artists and writers that included John Trumbull, Asher Brown Durand, and James Fenimore Cooper. Cole would go on to help found the National Academy of Design only a year later. In 1829, the artist made his first of two trips to Italy, producing oil sketches of Roman ruins, Mt. Etna, and the pastoral countryside. In the following two decades, the painter created some of his seminal works such as The Oxbow (1836). Basing his studio in the Catskill Mountains, Cole took on his first and only student in 1844, the talented young painter Frederic Edwin Church. His disciple Church went on to become one of the most prominent members of the Hudson River School. The artist died on February 11, 1848 in Catskill, NY. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, among others.
Thomas Cole Artworks
Thomas Cole
(119 results)
.jpg "River Landscape (American Lake in Summer)")
.jpg "Untitled (Hudson River Landscape)")
Attributed to Thomas Cole
Untitled (Hudson River Landscape)
Sale Date: April 14, 2019
Auction Closed
.jpg "Untitled (Hudson River Landscape)")
Attributed to Thomas Cole
Untitled (Hudson River Landscape)
Sale Date: September 16, 2018
Auction Closed
.jpg "Woman with Wreath (Maria Cole), 1846")
English (US)
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