Thomas Cole reinterpreted - 'Thomas Cole: Landscape into History,' National Museum of American Art, Washington D.C - Current And Coming

Magazine Antiques, March, 1994 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

THE EXHIBITION The West as America, organized in 1991 by the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C. (see ANTIQUES, March 1991, pp. 542-555), was in the vanguard of a revisionist movement in art history that continues to gather momentum. The same institution has now assembled a traveling exhibition reassessing the life and work of Thomas Cole, which will be on view at the museum from March 18 until August 7. Future showings will be listed in Calendar.

Thomas Cole: Landscape into History comprises more than seventy works, including wilderness views, pastorals, and landscapes embodying religious or secular allegories. The important series The Course of Empire (1834-1836) and The Voyage of Life (1842) are reunited for the first time since 1848. Also on view are studies for the final, but incomplete, series The Cross and the World. Contributors to the catalogue of the exhibition have sought to place Cole in the political, cultural, and religious environment of the early nineteenth century. It was the time of the tumultuous rise of Jacksonian democracy, evangelical revivals, and the growth of industry and the cities, which proceeded from the building of the railroads.

Cole moved to New York City in 1825, and at the outset of his career his champions were largely members of the city's aristocracy as well as Daniel Wadsworth in Hartford, Connecticut, and Robert Gilmor in Baltimore, Mayland--all introduced to him by the president of the American Academy of Fine Arts, John Trumbull. By the 1830's and 1840's self-made men such as Luman Reed, Jonathan Sturges, and Charles Leupp had also become important patrons.

Cole was never formally trained as an artist, and he always had difficulty rendering figures and perspective. These deficiencies might have led him to pursue landscape painting, an interest which had come to America via English eighteenth-century painters. The first domestic landscape subjects to interest painters were natural wonders such as Niagara Falls and the Natural Bridge of Virginia.

Cole began to experiment with what he called a "higher style of landscape" by creating pairs of canvases and series of historical landscapes embodying elevated themes. Cole prized these works, but they did not always find a ready market. He lamented, "I am not the artist I should have been, had taste been higher. For instead of indulging myself in the production of works such as my feelings & fancy would have chosen--in order to exist I have painted to please others."

Cole's interest in landscape was based on its historical and literary associations. Even in what appear to be simply landscapes Cole has inserted references to the past. An example is The Falls of Kaaterskill (see p. 350), a natural wonder in the Catskill Mountains of New York State that had become a popular tourist destination by the time Cole painted it in 1826. A wooden staircase had been erected so that tourists might climb to the top, but in his painting Cole eliminated this and other features, showing only the figure of a lone Indian long after Indians had been displaced from the region. Cole was interested in conveying his disdain for the march of progress and the effects it had on the landscape. As he wrote to Luman Reed, "If I live to be old enough I may sit down under some bush the last left in the utilitarian world and feel thankful that intellect in its march has spared one vestige of the ancient forest for me to die by."

The historical and allegorical paintings of the 1820's and 1830's gave way to the religious works that dominated the last decade of Cole's life, for he believed that religion might possibly solve society's ills. He worked religious emblems into his works and exhibited the paintings with a text that identified and explained each symbol.

The exhibition convincingly reveals how Cole dealt with current events and the highly personal way he interpreted them in his paintings. Seen in the context of his time, the paintings assume an importance beyond their considerable aesthetic merit. Ironically, many of the concerns that worried Cole also preoccupy us today.

The catalogue of the exhibition has essays by Christine Stansell, Sean Wilentz, William H. Truettner, Alan Wallach, and J. Gray Sweeney. It contains 256 pages, 60 illustrations, and 100 color plates. It may be obtained for $29.95 (paper covers) or $50 (hard covers) plus $2 for postage and handling from the Museum Shop, National Museum of American Art, Eighth and G Streets, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20560.