Explore Thomas Cole

  • Interactive Tour
  • Virtual Gallery
  • Cole's Landscapes
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Interactive Tour

Welcome to the Interactive Tour. Learn about a landscape painter who changed the course of American art.

In the early nineteenth century, many in this country were searching for an art they could call their own. Painter, poet, and essayist, Thomas Cole responded to this quest by creating pristine landscape paintings unlike any yet seen in America.

Critics, patrons, and fellow artists embraced his work enthusiastically, and Cole became the leader of an informal alliance of landscape artists now known as the Hudson River School.

Cole, Asher B. Durand, Frederic E. Church, Sanford Gifford, Jasper Cropsey, and other painters, along with literary figures such as William Cullen Bryant and James Fenimore Cooper, established a notion of America as “Nature's Nation,” a concept that still resonates with artists, environmentalists, and landscape enthusiasts to this day.

“If the imagination is shackled, and nothing is described but what we see, seldom will anything truly great be produced either in Painting or Poetry.”
Thomas Cole to Robert Gilmor, Jr., 25 December 1826. Painting credit: Asher B. Durand. Portrait of Thomas Cole. Oil on canvas, 1838. Berkshire Museum. Gift of Zenas Crane.

  • Falls of Kaaterskill
  • The Clove, Catskills
  • Course of Empire Series: The Savage State
  • Course of Empire Series: The Arcadian or Pastoral State
  • Course of Empire Series: The Consummation of Empire
  • Course of Empire Series: Destruction
  • Course of Empire Series: Desolation
  • View from Mount Holyoke
  • View on the Catskill, Early Morning
  • Voyage of Life Series: Childhood
  • Voyage of Life Series: Youth
  • Voyage of Life Series: Manhood
  • Voyage of Life Series: Old Age
  • Architect's Dream
  • Mount Etna From Taormina, Sicily
  • View of the Two Lakes and Mountain House
  • Kindred Spirits
thomas cole

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