Thomas Cole

English-born and American by passionate choice, Cole emigrated with his family at seventeen, discovered the Catskill Mountains on his first extended painting trip in 1825, and in that discovery effectively founded the first distinctly American school of painting. The Hudson River School — the group of landscape painters who followed and were taught by him — is his direct creation, and the moral seriousness he gave it shaped American attitudes toward wilderness and landscape for the rest of the century. Cole was not a naturalistic painter in the descriptive sense: his canvases were constructed studio works drawing on sketches made in the field, and they argued as much as they described. The argument was never far from prophecy. Cole looked at the American landscape and saw two things simultaneously: a surviving wilderness of near-biblical grandeur, and the axes already being taken to it. His five-part narrative series The Course of Empire (1833–36) — Savage State, Pastoral State, Consummation, Destruction, Desolation — is the most sustained work of environmental prophecy in 19th-century American painting: a visual meditation on the rise and inevitable fall of civilization, set in a generic Mediterranean landscape but universally understood to be about America's future. The series was enormously influential and helped establish large-scale historical landscape as a serious genre. He also taught Frederic Edwin Church, his only formal student, who would take his ambitions further in scale and geographic range. Cole died of pleurisy at forty-seven in 1848, leaving a generation of painters to carry the tradition. The Catskill Mountains he loved are now preserved in part by a conservation movement that owes something of its cultural vocabulary to the images he made of them.