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LANDSCAPE ART
For the greatest view painters, see:
Best Landcape Artists.
For the most popular views, see:
Famous Landscape Paintings.
For pleinairism, see:
Plein Air Painting.
For the 19th French style, see:
Barbizon School
of Landscape.
For 18th/19th English style, see:
English Landscape
Painting.
WORLD'S BEST ART
For the top painters, see:
Best Artists of All Time.
For a list of the best examples of
fine art painting, by the
world's top artists, see below:
Greatest Paintings Ever
Oils, watercolours, mixed
media from 1300-present.
Oil Painting
History, styles and development.
WHAT IS ART?
For an explanation of the
aesthetic issues surrounding
the creative visual arts, see:
Art Definition, Meaning
FAMOUS AMERICAN PAINTERS
For biographies of some of
the best American artists from
the 18th and 19th centuries, see:
Benjamin West (1738-1820)
History painter, portrait artist.
John Singleton Copley (1738-1815)
Portraitist and history painter.
Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828)
Portraitist of George Washington.
George Caleb Bingham (1811-1879)
Missouri frontier genre painter.
Whistler (1834-1903)
Noted for his Nocturnes, etchings.
Winslow Homer (1836-1910)
Seascapes, Civil War painting.
Thomas Eakins (1844-1916)
Famous for The Gross Clinic.
John Singer Sargent (1856-1925)
Society portrait painter.
Edward Hopper (1882-1967)
Noted for urban genre-paintings.
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Biography
Born in England, Cole worked as an apprentice
engraver before emigrating with his family to the USA in 1818. If it is
true that he learned the basics of drawing and painting from a wandering
portraitist called Stein, he had no apparent success with portraiture,
and his interest shifted to landscape. He moved to Pittsburgh in 1823
and from there to Philadelphia in 1824, where he drew from sculptures
at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, before rejoining his family in
New York the following year.
Artistic Breakthrough
In New York the sale of three paintings
financed a summer tour of the Hudson River Valley where he painted famous
Kaaterskill Falls and the ruins of Fort Putnam. On his return to New York
he placed three landscape pictures in the window of a bookstore, which
attracted the attention of the painters and art collectors John Trumbull
(1756-1843), William Dunlap (1766-1839) and Asher B Durand (1796-1886).
Trumbull was so taken with Cole's painterly skills that he purchased one
of the works and introduced him to several of his friends who also became
patrons of the artist.
This rapid recognition led to more painting
trips into the Hudson Valley, where Cole eventually settled in 1827 in
the village of Catskill, establishing an art studio at a farm called Cedar
Grove. It was here that he completed the majority of his work. In 1836,
he married Maria Bartow with whom he had five children. Greatly impressed
by the natural beauty of his surroundings, Cole infused much of his early
landscape art with great feeling and romantic grandeur.
Moves From Pure Landscape to Historical
Themes
At the same time, keen to see more works
by Claude Lorraine (1600-82)
and JMW Turner (1775-1851), both of whom he greatly
admired, he visited England and Italy between the years 1829-32 and 1841-1842.
Afterwards, due in part to the encouragement he received from Turner as
well as the English artist John Martin (1789-1854), he began to concentrate
less on the portrayal of natural scenery and more on allegorical and historical
themes, notably in two major series of paintings: The Course of Empire
(1836, New York Historical Society) and The Voyage of Life (1839-40,
Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Utica). After his second visit to Italy
in 1841-2, he completed a number of religious paintings. He also created
a number of architectural designs.
Thomas Cole died at Catskill in February
1848 at the comparatively young age of 47.
Cole's Artistic Approach
Cole's early Hudson River landscapes, largely
completed in the 1820s, presented the American rural scene through European
conventions of the picturesque and sublime - in a sense, a sort of combination
of Claude Lorrain and Caspar David
Friedrich (1774-1840). His later painting becomes larger in scale
and infused with literary and ethical narrative. He also injected it with
biblical and historical themes, sometimes infecting it with a sense of
unnecessary melodrama.
His early style reflected his genuine appreciation
for the beauty of the American wilderness, unspoilt by commercial development
or tourism, whereas his later, more grandiose interpretation, reflected
his fear of the clash between this pure nature and the aggressive American
materialism which he was afraid would gobble it up. His allegorical works,
The Course of Empire (1836) and The Voyage of Life (1839-40)
predicted the rise and fall of American culture.
Works by Thomas Cole
Paintings by Cole hang in many of the best
art museums in America. Among his key works are:
- Distant View of Niagara Falls (1830)
Art Institute of Chicago.
- The Course of Empire: The Savage State (1836) New York Historical Soc.
- View on the Catskill - Early Autumn (1837) Metropolitan Museum of Art
NY.
- Schroon Mountain, Adirondacks (1838) Cleveland Museum of Art.
- The Notch of the White Mountains (1839) National Gallery, Washington
DC.
The Hudson River School
This mid-19th century American art movement
consisted of a loosely organized group of romantic landscape artists,
who painted spectacular natural scenery, notably views of the Hudson River
Valley and the surrounding region, including the Adirondack, Catskill,
and the White Mountains. Inspired by such European masters as Claude Lorrain,
John Constable and JMW Turner, Hudson
River School landscape pictures are characterized by their realistic,
but idealized view of nature and reflect the idea that the beauty of the
American landscape was a manifestation of the divine. Most paintings were
based on sketches that were later worked up in the artist's studio, and
- though they included details of actual places - were often composite
scenes taken from multiple real and imaginary locations. (See also: American
Art:1750-present).
Painters
Members of the Hudson River School of landscape
painting, apart from Thomas Cole, included: Asher Brown Durand, as well
as later artists such as Frederic Edwin Church, Albert Bierstadt, John
Frederick Kensett, Sanford Robinson Gifford, John William Casilear, Samuel
Colman, Jasper Francis Cropsey, Thomas Doughty, Robert Duncanson, Asher
Brown Durand, James McDougal Hart, William Hart, William Stanley Haseltine,
Martin Johnson Heade, Hermann Ottomar Herzog, Thomas Hill, David Johnson,
Jervis McEntee, Thomas Moran, Robert Walter Weir, and Worthington Whittredge.
The work of this later group is sometimes referred to as Luminism,
or the Luminist movement, due to their luminous colour palette.
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