#Waterfall artwork series

He continued to produce American and foreign landscape subjects of incredible beauty, including the Mountain Ford (1846). After his return, he lived and worked chiefly in Catskill, keeping up with art activity in New York primarily through Durand.

#Waterfall artwork series

Cole painted and exhibited a replica of the series in Rome, where he returned in 1841–42, traveling south to Sicily. In it, a river journey represents the human passage through life to eternal reward. The artist’s marriage brought with it increasing religious piety manifested in the four-part series The Voyage of Life (1840). Cole’s travels and the encouragement and patronage of the New York merchant Luman Reed culminated in his most ambitious historical landscape series, The Course of Empire (1833–1836), five pictures dramatizing the rise and fall of an ancient classical state.Ĭole also continued to paint, with ever-rising technical assurance, sublime American scenes such as the View from Mount Holyoke (1836), The Oxbow (1836), in which he included a portrait of himself painting the vista and View on the Catskill-Early Autumn (1836-1837), in which he pastorally interpreted the prospect of his beloved Catskill Mountains from the village of Catskill, where he had moved the year before and met his wife-to-be, Maria Bartow. The region around Rome, along with the classical myth, also inspired The Titan’s Goblet (1833).

Thereafter he painted many Italian subjects, like View near Tivoli. Even as Cole expanded his travels and subjects to include scenes in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, he aspired to what he termed a “higher style of a landscape” that included narrative-some of the paintings in paired series-including biblical and literary subjects, such as Cooper’s popular Last of the Mohicans.īy 1829, his success enabled him to take the Grand Tour of Europe and especially Italy, where he remained in 1831–32, visiting Florence, Rome, and Naples. Cole became one of the founding members of the National Academy of Design in 1825. Dunlap publicized the discovery of the new talent, and Cole was welcomed into New York’s cultural community, which included the poet and editor William Cullen Bryant and the author James Fenimore Cooper. Trumbull brought Cole to the attention of various patrons, who began eagerly buying his work. What Trumbull recognized in the work of the young painter was the perception of wildness inherent in American scenery that landscape artists had theretofore ignored. Colonel John Trumbull, already renowned as the painter of the American Revolution, saw Cole’s pictures and instantly purchased one, recommending the other two to his colleagues William Dunlap and Asher B. Based on his sketches there, he executed three landscapes that a city bookseller agreed to display in his window. Moving to New York City in spring 1825, Cole made a trip up the Hudson River to the eastern Catskill Mountains. He soon moved on to Philadelphia to pursue his art, inspired by paintings he saw at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Born in Bolton-le-Moors, Lancashire, England, in 1801, at the age of seventeen he emigrated with his family to the United States, first working as a wood engraver in Philadelphia before going to Steubenville, Ohio, where his father had established a wallpaper manufacturing business.Ĭole received rudimentary instruction from an itinerant artist, began painting portraits, genre scenes, and a few landscapes, and set out to seek his fortune through Ohio and Pennsylvania. Thomas Cole inspired the generation of American landscape painters that came to be known as the Hudson River School.