America's Prodigy

By ROBERT HUGHES

During his short life -- he died in 1848, at the age of 47 -- Thomas Cole became something of a national culture hero: a young one for a young nation. He was esteemed as the founder of national landscape painting in the U.S. -- the so-called Hudson River School. At his death, the wild places of the Catskills mourned him. "We might dream," declaimed William Cullen Bryant in his funeral oration on Cole, "that the conscious valleys miss his accustomed visits and that the autumnal glories of the woods are paler because of his departure." His death, opined a newspaper editorial, was "a public and national calamity." Even allowing for the high rhetorical tint required of such exequies 150 years ago, it's hard to think of an American artist whose death, tomorrow, would inspire such sentiments.

Why did Cole's do so? For answers, consult "Thomas Cole: Landscape into History," a show of more than 75 paintings curated by art historians William H. Truettner and Alan Wallach on view at the National Museum of American Art in Washington through Aug. 7. It is highly engaging, not least because the curators -- without imposing a modern agenda on Cole's work -- have done such an intelligent job of ferreting out what ideas of American identity he satisfied, including political ideas.

Cole was the first boy wonder of American painting to prove himself entirely on native ground. Earlier prodigies, like Benjamin West, had had to do it in Europe, and it mattered greatly to John Singleton Copley's clients in Boston that Sir Joshua Reynolds praised Copley's early work. But neither Europe nor England paid attention to Cole. From across the Atlantic he would have seemed a mere provincial, fluctuating between derivative Claudian pastorals and apocalyptic religious allegory in the manner of John ("Pandemonium") Martin.

Cole had no formal training. He learned about landscape painting from theoretical tracts and the early-19th century equivalent of how-to manuals, backed up by a great deal of attentive looking. He couldn't draw the human figure -- but then neither could his hero, Claude Lorrain. His efforts in that direction, as in a huge painting of Prometheus chained to his rock with the eagle flying in for lunch, were risible. Wisely, he kept his Indians and woodsmen and saints in the far distance.

The outline of his life seems a fable of what emigration could inspire. The young artist -- Cole was the son of a small trader from Lancashire -- arrives in the aesthetically uncharted wilderness, where, self-taught, by dint of "natural vision," he begins to create a new, true and specifically American picturesqueness out of rocks, gorges, sunsets, trees and distant Indians. He is taken up by the plutocrats of his day, some with long patrician roots, like Stephen van Rensselaer III, America's biggest landlord, and others more recently arrived, like the grocery millionaire Luman Reed. Old money wanted to show that taste was not a monopoly of Europeans. New money hoped to prove that it too had refinement and a stake in forming the national image.

For earlier Americans, the men and women of the late 18th century, much of this image dwelt in the face. American artists such as Copley and Gilbert Stuart had forged careers for themselves as portraitists. But Cole was the first to do so through the medium of landscape painting -- basically because from 1820 on the national image no longer resided in the faces of founder- heroes like Washington, and history painting, except for a few commissions, was feeble and short of subjects. The desire to symbolize America was to pour, in a veritable cataract, into the great repository of American difference from Europe, the landscape itself.

Cole believed that nature reinforces morals, and hence was one of the first artists to sound a theme that has recurred in America down to the time of the spotted owl. Cole traveled in Italy and painted Arcadian scenes there, including -- somehow a very American touch -- one with a figure of himself watching peasants dance by a temple, while a goat reaches up to eat his jacket. But he wanted to import Arcadia to the American wilderness. In a country without antique monuments, the image of Arcadia serves to spiritualize the past. America's columns were trees; its forums were groves. No wonder Cole painted Daniel Boone in the pose and character of a river god all'antica.

You can't insist on a simple one-to-one connection between Cole's political views and his landscape paintings. Nevertheless, as Truettner and other contributors to the catalog convincingly argue, some links are there. Cole's life, which began shortly before Lewis and Clark crossed the continent and ended on the eve of the great California gold rush, stretched through troubled times for America. In particular there was the great upheaval over the presidency of Andrew Jackson, whose brand of populism was interpreted by American Whigs as the mortal enemy of aristocratic, landed interests.

Cole's paintings are often suffused with doubt and nostalgia, a sense that the America of early settlement and cooperative virtue was passing away, to be replaced by a harder, more competitive, get-and-spend society whose class pyramid seemed shaky. His work keeps circling around the image of pastoral America as an imperiled Arcadia, beset by storms that pass but, by their presence, connote disturbances in the social fabric.

His most famous image of this kind is View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, After a Thunderstorm, 1836 -- "The Oxbow," for short. On the right, the serene bend in the river, the golden Claudian light; on the left, a storm blotting out the distance, and blasted trees out of Salvator Rosa; in the foreground, the artist's painting kit, including a parasol -- the frail equipment of a witness to immense forces. Cole's way of moralizing his landscapes -- another example is the recurrent figure of the tree feller gazing on the panorama of his handiwork, the cleared wilderness, while leaning on his ax -- suited an American taste that was heavy with pious uplift.

; If moral opinion is a subtext in Cole's landscapes, it is the essence of his big historical-didactic cycles, notably The Course of Empire, five large allegorical paintings of the rise and fall of an imaginary state -- by implication, America -- that he did for Luman Reed at the then immense price of $5,000. It was meant, he said, to show "the natural changes of Landscape and those effected by Man in his progress from Barbarism to Civilization -- to the state of Luxury -- to the vicious state or state of Destruction etc." He stirred in all manner of different cultures in this pastiche. The Pastoral or Arcadian State, for instance, has references to early Hesiodic Greece coexisting with a temple based on Stonehenge; and the climactic paintings of The Consummation of Empire and Destruction are the kind of eclectic cast-of- thousands fantasies that would later be put on film by D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille.

These paintings start the train of American fantasy that will lead to San Simeon and Caesars Palace. They are wildly corny but in a weird way convincing: they bite off so much more than they can chew that you can't help assenting to them. And the target of their moralizing is none other than Andrew Jackson, who Cole (and many of his patrons) feared was becoming an American Caesar, filling the once virtuous republic with the corruptions of opportunism. It seems that Cole the landscapist and Cole the magniloquent history painter were not, as was once thought, different artists. They were the same man, embodying the same peculiarly American anxiety.