American Prospects, American Skies

"In the entire history of painting in America there has been no more conspicuous example of being the right man in the right place at the right time," writes Professor Howard Merritt in his introduction to the first major show of the works of Thomas Cole in 20 years.

The nation was young, proud and prickly. Proud of its achievements and of its mighty land, but looking for someone, somehow, to confirm it in its pride. It fell to Cole to see and paint the U.S. with a vision of its grandeur that expressed the young nation's inner vision --of a landscape that need yield pride of place to no other country.

Works Undefiled. Cole was the shy and sensitive son of an English immigrant who had set up shop as a wallpaper maker in the bustling new town of Steubenville, Ohio, where he arrived in 1818. Thomas helped his father with designs, was shown how to paint likenesses by one of the itinerant portrait painters who trudged from town to isolated town in early America. He set out to be a traveling portrait painter himself. Yet as he rested by the side of the road between jobs, he found himself powerfully drawn to the wilderness surrounding him. "These scenes of solitude from which the hand of nature has never been lifted," he noted, "affect the mind with more deep-toned emotion than aught which the hand of man has touched. Amid them, the consequent associations are of God, the Creator; they are his undefiled works." Cole decided to become a landscape painter instead of a portraitist.

The right place, as the young Cole quickly realized, was New York, whose prosperous merchants were eager to purchase paintings for their new mansions and whose intellectual community had already fostered the talents of William Cullen Bryant, James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving. Nature was in fashion. A speaker exhorted the nascent American Academy of Fine Arts in 1825: "The genius of your country points you to its stupendous cataracts and its ranging mountains. There, where nature needs no fictitious charms, place on the canvas the lovely landscape, and adorn our houses with American prospects and American skies." Cole may well have listened to this very injunction, having worked his way to New York by this time. During the summer he embarked on what was to be the first of many summer sketching trips up the Hudson River Valley.

He saw, with his painter's eye, a countryside that was indeed romantic, with deep gorges, beetling cliffs, and tumbling torrents. As a professional, Cole rejoiced because it was also a landscape that--unlike the more familiar Alps and the more picturesque Italian ruins--was at the time undiscovered by artists. "No Tivolis, Ternis, Mont Blancs, hackneyed and worn by the daily pencils of hundreds," he wrote with delight, "but primeval forests and virgin lakes."

Sometimes a Veil. The landscapes he painted from 1825 onward sold almost as fast as the oil was dry, and made Cole the founder of the school of Hudson River landscapists. Looking at the 61 oils currently on view at the Albany Institute of History and Art, it is not difficult to see why. The vivid delight that Cole took in his own country shines forth in every painstaking stroke of the brush. He never hesitated to record every twig and leaf, every misty morning cloud and shimmering drop of dew. Yet his best work is far from the merely literal. As he told a fellow painter, "I wait for time to draw a veil over the common details, the unessential parts." Then he judiciously eliminated them from his pictures. Even at the time that Cole painted Kaaterskill Falls, an observation pavilion and guard rails stood at the head of the falls, permitting big-city visitors to enjoy the view. In his picture of the scene, Cole eliminated both, and with unabashed romanticism substituted an Indian poised on a cliff who could have come from Cooper's "Last of the Mohicans."

With success, and yielding to the moralistic temper of the times, Cole in his later years immersed himself in elaborate allegories purporting to depict The Voyage of Life or The Course of Empire, for which he was widely acclaimed by his contemporaries. But as this show demonstrates, he always kept a passionate eye on his native land, convinced that a Sunny Morning on the Hudson River could have a beauty that the Alps themselves could not top, that all grandeur does not lodge in Rome.

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