‘My thoughts run in a different channel…if revealed, they would be little understood or appreciated…But am I better or wiser for this sense and perception of the beautiful, which I imagine myself to possess in a greater degree than the many?’
– Thomas Cole (private journal, 1836/7)
Thomas Cole was the visionary founder of the Hudson River School of Painting, which (in the early 19th century) was the birth place of American Romanticism. Cole was born, 1801 in Northern England near the town of Bolton in Lancashire. His family worked in the textiles industry until they emigrated to the United States in 1818 to find a new life and fortune. In the spring of that year the Cole family set sail from Liverpool to a new land…the rest, as they say, is history.
Thomas Cole pioneered and nurtured a poetic, aesthetic sensibility of landscape and the natural environment which has inspired successive generations of artists. Some might say that Cole’s cultural significance and art historical stature (at the peak of his career) was matched only by his British contemporaries such as J.M.W. Turner and John Constable.
As I encounter the dramatic, lush beauty of the Hudson Valley, I somehow feel in-tune with Mr. Cole’s spirit. I can’t help but wonder how his soul was stirred on his first view of the Catskill Mountains…
