Photo: Ɱ, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Thomas Cole was born in England in 1801 and came to the United States with his family as a teenager. He was largely self-taught as a painter.
In 1825 he took a steamboat up the Hudson and sketched the Catskill Mountains. Paintings from that trip sold quickly in New York, and his dramatic views of American wilderness started what came to be called the Hudson River School.
Cedar Grove
Cole spent summers and then lived at Cedar Grove, a farmhouse in the village of Catskill, where he married Maria Bartow in 1836. His painting View from Mount Holyoke, better known as The Oxbow, was finished the same year and is now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
He also painted large allegorical series, including The Course of Empire and The Voyage of Life.
Legacy
Cole died in 1848 at 47. His student Frederic Church and painters such as Asher Durand carried the style forward.
Cedar Grove is now the Thomas Cole National Historic Site. Visitors can see his studio and the view of the Catskills he painted. The Hudson River Skywalk connects the site across the river to Church’s Olana.
