Thomas Cole

American, 1801-1848

Born in England, Thomas Cole was an American Romantic landscape painter and one of the founders of the Hudson River School movement. Cole was born in Lancashire, England and emigrated to the United States in 1818. For the next several years, Cole moved between Ohio, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh while working as a portrait painter.  

In 1825, Cole settled in New York and traveled to the Catskill Mountains on the bank of the Hudson River. There, his small exhibition of landscape paintings gathered the attention of Colonel John Trumbell, who brought Cole into New York’s cultural community. That same year, Cole and his colleagues founded the National Academy of Design. Although Cole yearned to weave religion into his art, his romantic landscapes were already iconic, thus inspiring the impactful Hudson River School of American landscape painting 

After traveling some to Europe, Cole permanently relocated to Catskill, New York after marrying his wife, Maria Bartow, in 1936. During this period, he wrote his impactful “Essay on American Scenery”, which describes the threat of industrial development to the natural world. The later years of Cole’s career were filled with concern for the encroachment of urbanization and increasingly poor health. While continuing to paint, Cole centered religion as his guiding principle for the remainder of his life.