Thomas Cole’s Americas

“I am not a mere leaf painter.”  “I thought I would do something that would tell a tale.”  Thomas Cole was the British-born founder of the American Hudson River School—and teacher of its most famous artist, Frederic Church.  He was among the first to speak of the vital significance of natural wildernesses.  He was not a mere painter of nature pictures, as his early viewers supposed; nor was he an untaught Midlands boy whose naïve genius in art flourished in the exceptional democracy of his new country.  When Cole sold his first paintings in New York at the age of 24, he had crossed the Atlantic Ocean, and set foot on three continents.  He had sailed to the British West Indies and lived on an island that was the trading hub—and original slave ship port—of the Dutch empire.  He had completed grammar school in Chester, trained in woodblock design in Chorley, print engraving in Liverpool, and worked in woodcut illustration for a Philadelphia book publisher.  

         Thomas Cole’s Americas is about the interconnected story of art and life that the painter would tell us through his paintings.  It is an original approach that evokes cultural history to describe the life of the creative mind that engendered Cole’s art.  Memories of early sights and experiences, and lessons learned, surface in the narrative underpinnings of Cole’s paintings in maturity, and in his prose statements on the Americas he has known. There are no biographies of Cole, only specialized studies of his art.  His childhood in Greater Manchester would have combined fierce Dissenter belief in personal freedom with disturbing images of starving workers and their futile rebellions.  Grammar school in Chester introduced Cole to Britain’s illustrious past, even as mercantile Liverpool presaged the power and brash energy of Britain’s imperial future.  Liverpool’s prosperous docklands bore, as well, the marks of her status as Britain’s slave trade capital.  Cole’s first full year in the Americas spanned three divergent experiences. The first was of Philadelphia, birthplace of the Republic, Penn’s city of brotherly love, and Greek-Revival buildings devoted to history, natural history, and art.  The second was of small St. Eustatia in the Lesser Antilles archipelago, with its exuberant tropical foliage and incandescent skyscapes that inspired his visualized narratives of The Garden of Eden and The Voyage of Life.  The third was his solitary walk through the wildernesses of the Pennsylvania and Ohio River Valleys, where he saw “spots” of wild beauty amid the stains of battles and massacres on the Monongahela banks and at Bloody Pond near the Ohio River Fork—remnants of the British and French settlers’ wars of 1755-57 over Indigenous lands.  Experiences like these, known long before Cole took art classes at the Philadelphia Academy and resolved to be a landscape artist, form an understructure to the narratives of his art.  On later sketching trips, to the Catskills, White Mountains, and in Europe, Cole looked to see the natural and human histories witnessed by once-pristine landscapes, and then paint the mythic stories that told of their primordial geologies and originary civilizations.  Congressional Acts passed during Cole’s initial decade in North America: the 1819 decision to civilize Indigenous families and mission-school their children, and the 1830 decision to “relocate” Indigenous families in the States to a cordoned territory outside the Union and west of the fertile Mississippi River, endure as brooding undercurrents of his seemingly tranquil landscapes.  Paintings from Cole’s 1830-32 visit to Europe often recapture the sad history of lives embedded in the decline of civil structures and moral values.  His 1841-42 journey, to study the mythic landscapes of Sicily, registered the still extant beauty of the vistas and the storied intricacy of the civil ruins—even as he brooded on the symbolic meaning of these for his own country.

         Cole’s anxieties for human civilization, and its rapacious effects on wildernesses in the Americas and their dispossessed indigenes, grew with each year.  His paintings in maturity incorporate specific, prophetic stories for those who would see, hear, and comprehend.  Like Byron and Shelley, his artistic kin, Cole could see meaning in landscape features and intuit energies in once-peopled mountains, caves, and forests.  Cole was the first, in paint and in words, to indict the “dollar-godded utilitarians” and “copper- hearted barbarians” who possessed to destroy undefiled wildernesses.  Natural environments and human histories were interdependent for Cole; he was prescient in his sense that neither would survive disconnection.  He knew that the tale of vital connection told in his paintings would be largely missed by viewers who saw immediate visual gratification.  “I am alone; those around me only know me in part . . .,” Cole said.  As witnesses to Cole’s foresight in art and life, we must exert ourselves to see, and hear, the truthful tale that he would tell us.

George H. Gilpin and Hermione de Almeida

March 15, 2023