Explore Thomas Cole

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.