Arcadia by Telescope

Many a modern student of art who wandered into Manhattan's Whitney Museum last week smiled patronizingly at what he saw. On the walls were more than a hundred paintings and drawings by an almost forgotten U.S. landscapist named Thomas Cole. His worst pictures were vast neo-classical allegories done after he had become famous and made the Grand Tour of Europe. His best were meticulous and tender souvenirs of walking trips through the Catskills, the White Mountains and the old Northwest Territory, sometimes embellished with a log cabin, a lone hunter, or a circle of Indian braves. Under their tobacco-brown varnish, the paintings shone with light and space; they looked a little like Arcadia seen through a dusty brass telescope.

Why should a man waste his talents on the obvious? He seemed never to leave out a leaf or twig, and since he insisted on making himself such a slave to nature, wasn't it too bad he'd had no camera? The paintings, it appeared to some visitors, provided no more food for thought than the color photos in a resort folder.

Cole's approach to landscape was typical of his day, which was also the age of William Cullen Bryant and James Fenimore Cooper. Seven years before his death in 1848, Cole explained that "American scenes are not destitute of historical and legendary associations; the great struggle for freedom has sanctified many a spot, and many a mountain stream and rock has its legend, worthy of the poet's pen or painter's pencil . . . And in looking over the uncultivated scene, the mind may travel far into futurity. Where the wolf roams, the plow shall glisten; on the grey crag shall rise temple and tower . . ."

Cole knew the wilderness well. His father was an Englishman who opened a wallpaper shop in the frontier town of Steubenville, Ohio, in 1820. An itinerant portraitist dropped in one day, kindly taught young Cole how to make paint brushes from pig bristles. Soon the boy was wandering from town to town, painting portraits. He lugged along a saddle he had accepted in payment for one job, but he had no horse. Resting on his saddle, in the forest between settlements, he learned to know landscape, and his landscapes later made a hit. In five years he had a Manhattan studio and an invitation to help found the National Academy of Design. His fame, although it failed to outlast his own century, was already assured.

He laid his success to his legs as much as anything. "How I have walked," he told a friend ecstatically, "day after day, and all alone . . ."

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