Introduction | Thomas Cole: Eden to Empire | National Gallery

Thomas Cole was a prodigiously talented landscape painter from youth. It was he who would go on to invent the American landscape painting tradition. Cole was born in 1801 in the Lancashire mill town of Bolton-le-Moors. Growing up in the midst of the industrial revolution he would have witnessed firsthand the pollution and destruction of the natural environment caused by industrialization. Working in the textile industry he probably also saw the social impact, the so-called Luddites, workers destroying the machines which had replaced their labour. British landscape painting was at its zenith during the youth of Thomas Cole. He could see great works by Constable, Turner, John Martin, Lauterburg, painting the drama of the landscape but also an England under transformation in the industrial revolution, full of fire and smoke. After the Cole family emigrated to the United States in 1818, Thomas Cole taught himself to paint. He began to make his name painting the American wilderness in scenes that exclude any sign of settlement or industry or the kind of tourism that he would have seen in the Hudson River Valley and the Catskill Mountains. When he paints the Garden of Eden he uses the landscape of the American east coast combining it with the flora and fauna he would have seen on an earlier trip to the Caribbean and in the botanical gardens of New York City. It's not surprising that Cole should come back to England to study landscape painting. There was so much to be seen here at the Royal Academy, at the brand new National Gallery and in studios around the city. He would have seen for example sublime landscapes by John Martin, full of elemental destruction. Landscapes in which allegory also plays its part. In London Cole met and became friends with John Constable. Constable's fascination with clouds and weather effects also rubbed off on Cole who would later say that skies are the soul of all scenery adding that American skies are unsurpassed. London was not a great success for Cole. He arrived wanting to be accepted as a professional artist but found he was received rather as yet another student. After a couple of years he moved on south to Italy. It was there he discovered and took up the landscape oil sketch. It infused new energy into his art. It gave him a tool to capture the brilliant Italian light and the runes of ancient Rome. There he learned important lessons that he could carry back to America. One of Cole's greatest achievements was the five painting series The Course of Empire. This was a new development for American painting, an allegorical landscape. Each scene is set in the same imaginary landscape with its distinctive mountain. In the savage state we see huntsmen and their hounds in a wilderness. In the arcadian or pastoral state the huntsmen are replaced by shepherds and plowmen in a field but there's also a tree stump warning of the cost of progress. In Consummation of Empire, the largest painting in the series, we see an emperor parading grandly across a bridge. He's reminiscent of Roman emperors, of British colonialism in India and also Cole's concerns about industrial growth under the presidency of Andrew Jackson. In Destruction, the great city burns under a tempestuous sky. The citizens and soldiers battle as they're trapped by the broken bridge. In the final scene, Desolation, human history has disappeared. Nature reclaims the scene, healing the landscape. The Oxbow is Cole's great American masterpiece. Here all the lessons he's learned come together in a vast, ambitious painting of a specifically American landscape, this odd natural formation in Massachusetts. Cole has had a continuing influence on American painting from the time of his death in 1848. Generation after generation of American landscape painters, and landscape is a central subject to American painting, have looked back to the example of Cole. That continues to today when, for example, the Los Angeles artist Ed Ruscha acknowledges a continuing debt to Cole's image of America and of the American landscape.