Thomas Cole

Thomas Cole taught America to look at its own wilderness. Born in England in 1801 and largely self-taught, he came to the United States as a young man and, on sketching trips up the Hudson River and into the Catskill Mountains, found a subject nobody had made grand art from, the untouched American forest. The painters who followed him became known as the Hudson River School, the first native landscape movement in the country.

Cole was uneasy about the very progress his new country celebrated. In his five-part series The Course of Empire, finished in 1836, he shows the same landscape pass from wilderness to a marble empire and then to ruin, a warning about where ambition leads. His single most famous view, The Oxbow, sets a dark storm over untamed forest against sunlit farmland on the bend of a river, wildness and settlement in one frame.

He settled in the village of Catskill, New York, and kept painting the mountains within sight of his home. He died there in 1848, only 47, just as the wild country he had made famous was beginning to be cut, farmed and crossed by railroads.