Thomas Cole was an English-born American painter, born in Bolton, Lancashire, on 1 February 1801, who died at Catskill, New York, in 1848 at the age of 47.
He founded the Hudson River School, the first American school of landscape painters, after three small Catskill landscapes in a New York shop window made his name in 1825. He is remembered for The Oxbow and The Course of Empire, and for warning that the country he painted was cutting down what made it new.
He crossed the Atlantic at seventeen with no training as a painter. By 1836 he was painting the ruin of an empire.
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The man who taught Americans to love their own wilderness did not trust them with it. In the winter of 1835 to 1836 Cole watched development climb into the Catskills, the mountains he had made famous, and he called the people behind the railroad “copper-hearted barbarians.”
That same winter he was finishing a series of five paintings with the same message. The Course of Empire follows a single landscape from untouched wilderness to a city at the height of its wealth and then to ruin. A New York merchant, Luman Reed, had commissioned it, and when it was shown at the National Academy of Design in 1836 it was an immediate success with the public.
Critics took it for a warning to the young republic. Cole published an essay the same year that ends on a sentence about Eden, and about who had locked the gate.
What You'll Discover
Who bought his first three landscapes.
How one city rises and falls.
Why he wrote against the axe.
Who the small man in The Oxbow is.
Who he left the mountains to.