Thomas Cole

The Life of Landscape Painter Thomas Cole Thomas Cole was in influential painter during the Romantic art period and who, with his love of nature, established the Hudson River School. His landscape works encompass a theme of the beauty and wildness of nature. Cole created several paintings and also some series of paintings. His work focused on the Catskill mountains and surrounding areas, where he lived. Many allegorical and symbolic references are found in his paintings because his art tells stories. To begin with, Thomas Cole was born in Bolton-le-Moors, Lancashire, England in 1801. He was apprenticed to be a calico designer, and his days were filled with carving and designing wooden blocks. The Cole family’s wool business faced financial

Luman Reed commissioned him to do a series in New York City. It is called The Course of the Empire, a series of five paintings in a fictional landscape that is transformed by five stages of human development. The first painting, Savage State, and the second painting, Arcadian State, portray wilderness untamed by man. Consummation of Empire, the third painting in the series, includes roads, bridges, buildings, an emperor triumphing with a victory, and joyous crowds. In the fourth painting, however, Destruction, the civilization has fallen and a horde destroys the city. People are running away in fear. Desolation, the final painting in the series, shows that man is gone. There is equilibrium, and nature regenerates from the ruins of the civilization. Each of the paintings has a central theme of a mountain, symbolizing nature, and it remains constant while the civilization grows, thrives, and then demolished. Cole stated that the succession of events in this series is the five stages of human development. He declared that human history “follows a cycle akin to that of nature” (The 19th Century: America, 752). This particular series questioned humanity’s ability to control

He was drawn to the most dramatic sides of nature, such as waterfalls, chasms, holes, storms, the fury of weather, and the balance of light and dark. Nature’s life cycles became a metaphor to him for the human condition. All of his paintings are meant to tell stories about life and nature. He captured the sense of wilderness and the power of land that hasn’t been explored by humans. He loved nature and cared deeply for the health of the environment, not wanting negative consequences for the landscapes he painted. Cole aimed to create artworks that people could relate to about their journeys in life and encourage a reverence for the natural world, instilling a sense of peace and calm in