Thomas Cole at Artprice. To look at auction records, find Cole's works in upcoming auctions, check price levels and indexes for his works, read his biography and view his signature, access the Artprice database.
Cole
is an American painter, one of the founders of Romantic landscape painting
in the New World. He was born into an Anglo-American family in England
in 1801. The family returned to the United States in 1818; until then young
Thomas had received training in drawing and wood engraving. In the USA,
he entered the Philadelphia Academy of Art in 1823.
Later he settled in the Catskills on the Hudson and became a co-founder
of the so-called Hudson River School, which established Romantic landscape
painting in America. Direct, spontaneous landscapes painted in the wilderness
of the Catskill Mountains brought rapid recognition and attracted New York
buyers: The Clove, Catskills (c.1827).
In 1829 and 1841-1842 Cole traveled to Europe, he visited England, Switzerland
and Italy, studying in particular the landscapes of European masters. On
his return, having also absorbed philosophical and literary ideas, Cole
introduced a new type of painting to America: the symbolic, moral landscape,
as represented by the series on the themes of The Course of Empire (1832;
New York, Historical Society) and The Voyage of Life (1839/40; Utica, Munson
William Proctor Institute): The Course of Empire:
The Savage State (1836), The Voyage
of Life: Childhood (1842). These are fantastic, symbolic scenes
full of unusual effects of grandiose space and theatrical contrasts of
light. Not satisfied with great American nature any longer, Cole increases
fantastic and mystical character by introducing Biblical and antique subjects.
His late pictures do not attain the fine quality of his earlier atmospheric
landscapes, they are rough and primitive, but are supposed to stun spectators
with extremely pretentious surrealism.
Bibliography:
Art of the United States of America. 1675-1975. by A. Chegodayev.
Moscow. Iskusstvo. 1976. (in Russian)
The
Life and Works of Thomas Cole by Louis Legrand Noble, Elliot
S. Vesell (Editor). Black Dome Pr, 1997.
Thomas
Cole (Famous Artists Series) by Matthew Baigell. Watson-Guptill
Pubns, 1988.
Thomas
Cole's Poetry: The Collected Poems of America's Foremost Painter of the
Hudson River School by Thomas Cole, Marshall B. Tymn (Editor).
George Shumway Pub, 1972.