Thomas Cole
Thomas Cole ( February 1, 1801 * in Bolton, Lancashire, † February 11, 1848 in Catskills, New York) was a born American painter in England. He is considered the founder and the most important representatives of the Hudson River School, a group of American artists in the mid-19th century, which was known for accurate, detailed reproduction of American landscapes, often associated with historical and allegorical image issues.
Life
In his youth in England Cole learned to make wooden printing blocks, which was printed calico. 1818 the family emigrated from their home in North West England to America and settled in Steubenville, Ohio. Thomas was initially for one year alone in Philadelphia. Then he moved to Steubenville to his family and worked with in the Tapetenmanufaktur his father. The Basics of Technique with oil paints he learned from a wandering portrait painter named John Stone, was itself but with little success to its specialty and soon took the first attempts at landscape painting. In 1823 he followed his family to Pittsburgh, also worked here in his father's company and made in his spare time, systematic landscape studies. He developed those precise technique which became the basis of his later landscape painting.
1823/24 talked Cole again in Philadelphia. Here he studied intensively the landscape paintings in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and decided to become a professional painter. 1825 he moved to New York, where parents and sisters now lived. The merchant George W. Bruen was aware of the young painter and financed him a study trip along the Hudson River to the Catskill Mountains in September and October 1825. Three small format oil paintings that were created from sketches from this trip, Cole turned in a shop window. There they saw the influential in the New York art world John Trumbull, painter and long-time president of the American Academy of Fine Arts, which mediated the young colleagues links to the leading artists and patrons of the city. As Cole in 1829 decided to meet in Europe the masterpieces of the past in the original, he was a founding member of the National Academy of Design ( a company founded in 1826 Artists' Association, organized the annual exhibitions of contemporary American artist and based in New York City still exists today ) and recognized as an important American landscape painter.
In Europe, he continued his education in the museums of London, Paris, Florence, Rome and Naples. Above all, his stay in Italy brought him idealistic themes and ideas in more detail. As a typical representative of the romance he sought in his landscape paintings express moral values and to tackle issues that were previously reserved for history painting. After his return in November 1832, he found a sympathetic patron in New York businessman and gallery owner Luman Reed. From August 1841 to July 1842 Cole went again to Europe, visited relatives in England and traveled to France, Italy and Switzerland. During the trip, he perfected his painting technique, especially the coloring and the reproduction of sky and clouds. Within the United States traveled Cole in 1846 in the Adirondacks, a mountain range in the northeastern part of the state of New York and in 1847 to Niagara Falls.
Since 1825 Cole regularly visited the place Catskill, New York. The landscape of the Catskill Mountains fascinated him, he found the mountains " rise from the valley of the Hudson like waves of an ocean when the storm subsides ." In the summer months the painter lived and worked in outbuildings of an extensive farm called Cedar Grove. Here was an essential part of his oeuvre. In November 1836 he married Maria Bartow, a niece of the farm owner, and constantly lived there ever since. However, he always maintained close contact with the art scene of New York City, with artists, collectors and writers who often visited him in Cedar Grove. Among his closer colleagues landscape painter Asher Brown Durand included (1796-1886) and Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900), who was his pupil 1844-1846. The couple Cole had three sons and two daughters. 1842 Thomas Cole decided to join the Episcopal Church and was baptized in the St. Luke's church in Catskill. After a short, violent respiratory illness he died on Friday, February 11, 1848. Due to the extremely cold weather at that time were only a few of his friends attend the funeral.
Cedar Grove has been added to the list of National Historic Sites in 1999 and after renovation since 2001, the two dog the first year after birth Coles, publicly available. In honor of the painter of the fourth highest peak in the Catskills is named Thomas Cole Mountain.
Thomas Cole was a member of the Federation of the Freemasons, his box Amity Lodge No. since 11 February 1822. 5, is a resident of Zanesville (Ohio ).
Work
Cole praised the value of the landscape itself, the spiritual values inherent in their beauty. The Catskill Mountains (besides impressions of Italy and of the White Mountains, which lie northeast of the Catskills ) offered him the favorite subjects for his many pure landscape images as well as the representations with explicit allegorical or historical background. For him, nature and religion were linked inseparably. He criticized the development of modernity and threw his contemporaries, not to pay more attention simplicity and beauty. In an essay he noted: "Our society seeks only then, to accomplish something, instead of enjoying something ...". In a letter to the art collector Robert Gilmore Jr. in Baltimore, he wrote in 1826: " When the imagination is bound and only described what we can see, then something truly great is only very rarely in poetry as in painting arise. "
For Luman Reed Cole painted the five -part cycle entitled The Course of Empire (1836 completed ), which is one of his best known works. The images depict a slightly different landscape sections develop a civilization from barbarism through its heyday up to dissolution and destruction. The contemporary critics rejected the series for technical reasons. Today, the view gave an opinion that it was not a promising idea to show in the young United States in addition to the rise and the inevitable end of a society. Most clients preferred but anyway directly recognizable American landscapes that Cole gave them. Although he emphasized frequently that the less liked to paint such pictures, these purely realistic landscapes the same artistic quality is granted, as its generally known works with religious or allegorical accent.
1837 created The Departure and The Return, two imaginary landscapes. Another pair of thematically related images had Cole in 1828 with painted The Garden of Eden and Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, in which he expressed his fears about the impending destruction of nature. Other allegorical landscapes are Dream of Arcadia ( 1838) and The Architect 's Dream (1840 ). In addition, available in two versions, the four-part series, The Voyage of Life from 1842, which also is one of the most well-known works Coles. The novel describes a journey on the river of life through the four stages of life of the people as a child, adolescent, adult and old, each headed by a guardian angel. The landscape is shown in moods of the four seasons. As usual in Coles images, people or animals are shown very small, landscape and sky dominate the scene and play the lead role.
The Voyage of Life
Youth
Manhood
Old age
Buildings and texts
Occasionally, Cole was working as an architect, without any training in this area. In 1836 he took part in a competition for a government building in Columbus (Ohio ), and won the third prize. The finished building will contain elements of the designs of the first three winners, but resembled especially the contribution of Coles. After the church building of the Episcopalian St. Luke's church was destroyed in a fire in Catskill, the new building was built to a design by Cole.
In the 1840s, published in New York newspapers and magazines, letters and poems by Cole. He wrote detailed diaries and wrote an acclaimed essay on the American landscape ( Essay on American Scenery, 1835). In it, he praised the beauty of untouched nature. He found the landscapes in Europe reflected the ravages of civilization resists, cleared for the entire forests, eroded mountains and rivers had been diverted. The wilderness of America, however, he saw as a manifestation of God's grace and complained that the signs of progress were beginning to be seen here as well.