Thomas Cole

L’arrivée d’artistes formés en Europe, l’émergence d’autodidactes locaux, l’existence de lieux et paysages originaux ont permis à la peinture de se développer rapidement en Amérique du Nord. Certains artistes se sont consacrés à des « vues » de lieux bien définis. Ils devaient les représenter avec fidélité, se permettant au plus quelques embellissements. Les aquarellistes voyageurs et amateurs, comme George Heriot, ont ainsi laissé des œuvres délicates et de grande beauté. Des femmes éduquées, comme la baronne Hyde de Neuville, s’exerçaient avec talent au dessin et à l’aquarelle, devant les scènes offertes par leur vie personnelle.

D’autres artistes, plus ambitieux, devenus professionnels, travaillant au chevalet, considéraient les paysages comme des objets naturels méritant l’exactitude mais pouvant aussi être transformés ou chargés d’un sens dépassant celui de la simple perception visuelle. Sur ces nouveaux principes, Thomas Cole a fondé la Hudson School of Painting. Une floraison de peintres renommés a suivi ce premier maître d’un art du paysage authentiquement américain. Avec George Catlin et Karl Bodmer, le travail de l’artiste s’apparente à un reportage. Tout est représenté, lieux, paysages, personnages, événements.

Le grand artiste naturaliste John James Audubon, contemporain de Thomas Cole, abordait la représentation des lieux et paysages comme de simples décors à ses portraits d’oiseaux. Sa vie donne au livre la trame d’un parcours à travers l’art américain, dans la première moitié du 19ème siècle et sur l’ensemble des régions formant alors les États-Unis et le Canada, de la Floride au Sud jusqu’au Québec et l’embouchure du Saint Laurent au Nord.

The growth of nationalism from the nineteenth century created a demand for visual representations of the national territory and riverscapes like Claude Monet’s impressions of the Seine, Isaak Levitan’s Volga views, or Thomas Cole’s Hudson scenery, became iconic not least because they embodied nationalist ideas about place and culture. The riverscape could not only symbolize the nation’s physical character, but through aspects such as style, the figures portrayed, and the nature of the implied spectator, it could represent the nation’s cultural identity.
Powerful religious and political groups at different times, in diverse cultures have appropriated river mythologies. This book suggests that modern riverscapes similarly incorporated dominant, frequently religious conceptions of the nation. Drawing on the symbolic potential of rivers to represent life and time, the riverscape provided a metaphor for the mythic stream of national history flowing unimpeded out of the past and into the future. Simultaneously, it fixed and framed the river in a recognizable national imagery. Focusing on five examples, the Hudson, the Thames, the Seine, the Volga and the Shannon, this book shows how riverscapes transformed the abstract idea of the nation into a potent visual and cultural image.

Thomas Cole, the father of North-American landscape painting, created at Catskills a compositional formula, which he used in many of his artworks. The Transcendentalist philosophy, Christian religion and theories of ether in physics influenced his work on this composition. The resulting conceptual and formalistic elements became defining for this painter's oeuvre. Developed by other masters of the Hudson River School, Cole's composition provided a foundation for the North American landscape.

This paper studies contrasting American attitudes towards Old Master art. In particular it seeks to explain and contextualize the phenomenon of American artists traveling abroad to refine their artistic education with a stop at the Uffizi Museum in Florence to copy its masterpieces. Though mostly from the US, these artists also include Canadians, Mexicans, Argentians, and Brazilians. Also included in this group of cultural pilgrims were seven American women artists who studied Old Masters at the Uffizi. An appendix lists the 135 American artists who petitioned for permission to copy at the Uffizi in this period.

This report presents background research and planning for the exhibits of a visitors’ center at Olana, the 19th-century landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church’s 250-acre estate overlooking the Hudson River in upstate New York. Designed and built in 1870-1874 by Church in collaboration with architect Calvert Vaux, the Persian style villa that is the heart of Olana is surrounded by Romantically landscaped parklands and an ornamental farm. Today, the estate is a New York State Historic Site and attracts some 250,000 visitors annually.

Critics and commentators from the period to the present day have proclaimed the landscape paintings of the Hudson River School America’s major contribution to global nineteenth-century art and named Thomas Cole the “father” of that group for his intellectually ambitious canvases. However, the Hudson River School’s preoccupation with the domestic landscape has been overlooked. This chapter offers an alternate history of American landscape painting by placing Thomas Cole’s multifaceted engagement with country houses in the context of a national concern with domesticity in these years and in relation to the work of the “painter-architects” who followed Cole.

Awarded the 2018 Landscape History Essay Prize, Society of Architectural Historians

"Thomas Cole's paintings of the country house of the antebellum agriculturalist and geologist George William Featherstonhaugh have fallen into undeserved obscurity. The mere fact that Cole made "house portraits" goes against received wisdom about his rejection of topographic view painting in favor of a rigorously intellectual and poetic art of landscape. Moreover, the reception history of the three surviving canvases in this series has been clouded by the political disputes period commentators had with the patron. Reexamining existing sources alongside new archival discoveries, William L. Coleman interprets the Featherston Park paintings as early evidence of Cole's abiding concern with the inhabited landscape across media."

The text for the first exhibit at Hudson River School landscape painter Thomas Cole's home in  Catskill, NY. The exhibit opened in summer 2000 when the site was still known as "Cedar Grove." Today the house is known as the Thomas Cole House National Site and is an affiliate of the National Park Service. This exhibit text overviews Cole's life and work with particular emphasis on his time and work at Cedar Grove.

The article explores the evolution of the discourse of taste during the XVIII and XIX centuries, adopting the categories of pure and impure as paradigmatic keys to the subject. Reyn-olds' standards of aesthetic judgement, and the voices of Hogarth and Richard Payne Knight, mark the drive towards taste as subjective response. Thus young Marianne Dashwood can judge whether Edward Ferrars' taste is pure or impure. Taste, despite Hazlitt's warnings, becomes synonymous with fashion, and fashion is an impure element, conditioned by new technologies, allowing the manufacture of endless replicas from original art works. The Great Exhibition is the pivotal event that consecrates the productions of industry, commerce and art. Such triangulation thrives on the scientific progress of chemistry, which presides over the offer of new materials, colours, printing techniques, Parian marble, electroplated metal, allowing all kinds of cheap imitations. John Ruskin comments upon the triumphant progress of chemistry: and often uses analogies or metaphors taken from this science in order to explain the obscure processes of the artist's associative imagination. Purity of taste – or its impure connections with chemical works and their products – are discussed by Ruskin. But the paradigm pure/impure is also relevant to the work of Victorian art critics. Walter Pater and Vernon Lee recur to chemistry in order to explain the mysteries of the subjective response to art. Writers follow, such as Collins and Stevenson, who weld the strange mixture of pure and impure elements in human nature to chemistry, and thus place on the epistemic horizon of this science the fundamental questions of their age.

Connecting post-imperial studies to ruin studies, The Conquest of Ruins reconstructs and analyzes the Roman Empire’s afterlife as Western Europe’s history of neo-Roman mimesis. Each moment in the long European history of imitating Rome, from Charles V to the Nazi empire, generated its own mimetic practices as well as a vast body of texts reflecting on the history and theory of Roman and neo-Roman empires. The Romans’ monumentalizing empire-making and theatricality of politics pre-structured later imitations. These moments of neo-Roman mimesis created the ancient empire as the ultimate expression of imperial power. At the same time, they also produced a never-ending series of scenes about Roman ruins. The first of these ruin scenarios originated with the Romans’ conquest of Carthage. Constructing the ancient Roman metropole as a ruined stage, these scenes thematize the enigma of Rome’s fall. They also define empire’s time as eschaton or endtime and raise the question about how to ward off the end. Operating in this endtime, political leaders, imperial theorists, and artists went in search of strategies to fortify their empires. The book traces this obsession with the Roman empire’s ruinous end from Augustus to Hitler, Polybios to Carl Schmitt, Virgil to Riefenstahl, and Roman to Nazi architecture. The author combines intellectual history with literary/visual and psychoanalytic methods of analysis concerning identification as Besetzung/occupation and the nexus of visuality, power and desire. She proposes a model of imperial mimesis and the neo-Roman imaginary and analyzes the theatrical form of ruin scenarios across different textual and visual media. She also develops a notion of realism proper to the political aesthetics of neo-Roman empires. This notion is based on the ruin’s absent presence and mimesis as a mode of representation that demands both recognition and imitation.

The Moving Panorama of Pilgrim’s Progress is an extraordinary 8-foot by 800-foot painting that was created in 1851 and thought lost for a full century. Rediscovered in 1996 and fully restored in 2012, it illustrates John Bunyan’s iconic book The Pilgrim’s Progress—first published in 1678 and in print continuously since then—a heart-stopping allegory of trial and faith in which the hero, Christian, battles giants, monsters, tricksters, and his own weaknesses to reach the Celestial City. Moving panoramas were a mid-nineteenth-century precursor to the motion picture, massive canvases that were scrolled across a stage and accompanied by a lecturer and music. One of only a handful that survive today, the Moving Panorama of Pilgrim’s Progress was one of the most popular and important moving panoramas of its day, with designs by rising luminaries of the Hudson River School of American landscape painting: Frederic Edwin Church, Jasper Cropsey, Daniel Huntington, and others. Scholars and fans of theater and film, panoramas, American art, religious studies, literature, and The Pilgrim’s Progress itself will value this beautifully illustrated volume.

This chapter situates the Nazis' discourse and aesthetics of  ruins in the context of western imperialism's post-Roman mimesis. The fall of Rome represents a problem for all post-Roman empires, a problem visualized in the scenario of the imperial ruin gazer which originates with Polybios' account of the Romans' victory over Carthage. I read Hitler's visit to Rome in 1938 as the staging of this scenario. This staging reasserts the scopic mastery of the sovereign imperial subject over Rome's ruins, eliminating the barbarian ruin gazer from the scene.