Thomas Cole
"Influential people of the nascent New York cultural scene embraced his work enthusiastically, and Cole became the leader of an informal alliance of landscape artists now known as the Hudson River School. Cole, Asher Durand, Frederic Church, Sanford Gifford, Jasper Cropsey, and other painters, along with literary figures such as William Cullen Bryant and James Fenimore Cooper, forged a self-consciously “American” style and landscape vision for what was still a relatively new nation." |
Thomas Cole was born in England in 1801 and later immigrated with his family to the United States. A lot of his artwork had to do with landscapes, especially around the Catskill Falls near New York. Thomas Cole also did quite a few paintings involving Native Americans. He would create his paintings of how he thought it would have looked. In certain paintings if there was something man-made where he was looking to paint, he would just remove that and paint it like it would look like if that man-made object was not there in the first place.
Thomas Cole wanted, like George Catlin, to show another side of Native Americans than was widely known. When a lot of people thought of Native Americans they thought of the more "savage" image that they had of Native Americans, especially Native American men. Cole also created pieces of artwork that would depict famous scenes from literature, like the popular The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper and others. |
The image above is a scene from James Fenimore Cooper's iconic novel The Last of the Mohicans titled, Landscape with Figures: Scene from Last of the Mohicans To learn more about Thomas Cole or his artwork you can visit the Thomas Cole National Historic Site. http://www.thomascole.org/learn-menu/ |