For Americans, Thomas Cole is a household name. He painted America’s wild landscapes and lamented its destruction by the country’s early industrialisation. Yet the Lancaster-born Cole is little known in Britain, living stateside for most of his adult life. The National Gallery has been working with the Met to bring home Cole and his works. And what a homecoming it is.
Inspired by Turner and Constable, Cole was a self-made man, learning to paint through tenacity and a small collection of books. Like Constable, Cole obsessed over nature and ideas of decay (Constable’s crumbling ‘Hadleigh Castle’ was a favourite). From Turner and Claude, Cole learned for the first time that skyscapes can be depicted in glorious oranges and the deepest blues, simultaneously fantastical and realistic.
Not that Cole needed any help in imagining the ethereal. One of his early works was ‘The Garden of Eden’, in which a verdant foreground of tropical woods framed a luminescent mountain waterfall in the distance, calling to mind God’s Olympian seat.
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