View of the Thames

In 1843 the young New York painter Cornelius Ver Bryck sailed for England, already sick with the tuberculosis that would kill him. He came home with sketches, and on 31 May 1844 he died in New York, aged 31. The National Academy of Design asked Thomas Cole to write his eulogy. The next year Cole took one of Ver Bryck's drawings and worked it up into this small panel of the Thames, and he recorded the debt on the back in his own hand, painted by T. Cole from a sketch by C. Verbryck, 1845. Cole knew the river himself. He had lived in London from 1829 to 1831, at the start of his career. The picture went straight to Jonathan Sturges, a New York merchant who bought from Cole and his friends, and it stayed with Sturges's descendants until his granddaughter, Mary Fuller Wilson, left it to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1963. Cole died early in 1848. A year later Sturges commissioned Asher Durand to paint Kindred Spirits, showing Cole and the poet William Cullen Bryant together in the Catskills, as a tribute to him.