Thomas Cole is today known as the founder of the Hudson River School of art, which was a particular approach to painting that focused on providing a realistic and detailed look at the American landscape at that time in history. His paintings frequently focused on landscapes that included water as a part of the depiction. Artists following Cole’s example concentrated on portraying both the tamed landscape of settlements and the untamed wild places that were then still close while attempting to visually capture the prevailing attitudes toward nature. The tradition Cole established was fully developed during what was called the Romantic period, which was a time of doubt as the Industrial Revolution began changing the image of the landscape as well as hope as the developing cities and factories were offering an easier life for the future. This sense of hopeful doubt gave these landscapes a warm richness, strong contrasts with deep shadows and a sense of hopeful change and renewal in the constant presence of flowing water. Cole’s effectiveness was brought about as a result of his ability to blend romanticized ideas of the landscape with a natural realism reflected in the water as can be seen in his paintings.
The warm light that characterizes the romantic image of the American landscape appears in some of Cole’s earliest paintings, such as the “Falls of Kaaterskill” (1826). This 43” x 36” oil on canvas painting is a landscape heavy in contrasts, featuring a bank of heavy storm clouds in the upper left to balance out the deepened shadows in the bottom right which also explains the dark shadows in the central field. However, the patch of brilliant blue sky and fluffy white cloud in the upper right brings attention to the central brilliant splash of water in the central bottom. Bare winter branches reach up uncertainly from the bottom right, but they are countered by the brilliant reds and oranges of the autumn trees along the left side while the deep greens of the trees of the forest in the background promise a reversal of seasons that leads to the abundance of fall harvests. The bright splashing of the water on the rocks suggests the country is coming out of a time of confusion and darkness and entering a period of energetic light and growth with the vigorous flow of water and the strength of color depicted.
Painted the same year as “The Falls of Kaaterskill”, the 25 ¼” x 35 ¾” oil on canvas “Kaaterskill Falls” (1826) provides the viewer with a different perspective on the same water feature and landscape while still using the same basic thematic techniques. This time the viewer seems to be peering out from a cave almost directly under the waterfall. From this viewpoint, the visible landscape is downstream rather than up, but the image remains filled with the rich reds, oranges and golds. To an even greater extent, this painting is balanced among the four corners with lights in the upper right and lower left contrasted with darks in the upper left and lower right. This forces the focus of the painting into the rich gold tones that light the banks on the course of the river as it churns over the rocks, again emphasizing the energy of the post-storm era in preparation for new growth and change. The water comes pouring down from overhead, suggesting that sometimes even in shadow, there is reason to hope.
In “Distant View of Niagara Falls” (1830), measuring approximately 19” x 24” oil on panel, Cole subtly alters the positioning of the dark and light to achieve a marked change in emotional content. The dark clouds take on a greater depth as compared to the shadows of the lower right and they sweep across the horizon in a sweeping arch that fills the left side and reaches in a narrowed point to the right. The boiling mists of the falls fill the central ground, calling attention inward, yet the eye continues to be led upward to the flame-like shapes of the white clouds in the upper right as well as down to the flame-like shapes of the fall trees and the two Indians standing on the point overlooking the falls as well. Through his continued use of a rich, mid-tone value, sweeping scale and flowing lines, Cole established a sense of the idyllic forms of pastoral romanticism. By depicting the confluence of the falls in this way, Cole suggested that his own time was experiencing a golden age of abundant flowering. At the same time, he established a sense of discord through subject, forms and color.
With “Titan’s Goblet” (1833), another oil on canvas, Cole begins to move away from the strictly pastoral landscape by including elements of the architectural. Water again plays a central role in the image as it appears overflowing from the cup of plenty, the goblet of the Titans. The Titans were mythical beings who once walked the earth before the coming of the ancient Greek gods who defeated them to make room for mortals. Although the water falls like rain or a series of waterfalls around the rim of the goblet, there are no dark clouds to mar this landscape. Instead, the sun, sitting low on the horizon, shines weakly through hazy clouds, bathing the scene in soft light and glinting off the calm sea in the background. Water plays a significant role in this piece as it also appears in a secluded rocky harbor in the foreground of the painting and in frozen form upon the peaks of the mountains in the distance. Although Cole still uses warm golds and oranges in this painting, these are toned down from his earlier work to include brighter greens and the pastels of the skies. The ring of growing things at the base of the goblet suggests that this is an abundant land simply waiting to reach its full cultivated potential.
The full title of “The Oxbow”, a 51 ½” x 76” oil on canvas painting, is “View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm” (1836). This title is significant in that it provides the direction of the action, which is the direction Cole most often painted. Westerners are taught to ‘read’ things from a left to right orientation, which would suggest the dark storm bulked on the left side of the canvas over a wild and darkly vegetated hill is about to overtake the small community in the golden river valley on the right. With the title, though, Cole suggests that the thunderstorm has already passed the community, allowing the viewer to relax that no harm will befall it. The broken lines of the trees in the foreground prevent the eye from falling out of the picture as it is beaten down by the heavy verticals of the rainshower while the softened openness of the limitless plains below draw the eye to seek details where there are none. The gentle curve of the oxbow in the river helps to draw the eye to the center and back up to the wilderness at a leisurely pace while a tiny self-portrait of the artist at his easel, the top of which serves as a sort of tiny arrow pointing directly at the fields below, again encourages movement and seemingly random circular wandering. In this painting, he provides the water in both its wild state as it falls in torrents upon the wilderness and in its tame state as it flows calmly and peacefully along the edge of the communities below, keeping them safe from the untamed lands of the near hill.
In 1836, Cole undertook a series of paintings exploring the effects of man on the landscape that he entitled “The Course of Empire”. Each of the oils was intended to depict a different phase of occupation. “The Course of Empire: The Pastoral or Arcadian State” appears very much like his earlier paintings in its approach and subject. It is greatly romantic and filled with the golden light for which he was so famous. The atmospheric elements seen in this landscape give it a taste of a time long past never to be recaptured again. The land is divided unevenly as its use is largely dictated by the landscape features that are already in place. A seemingly calm, wide river divides the abundance of the foreground from the barrenness of the far shore but otherwise seems to play little important role to the existence of the people there. However, there is already a strong indication of the way in which the people will begin to change the landscape. There is a relatively permanent-looking structure built in the central mid-ground sending smoke into the sky as it guards a narrow place in the river and a clearing has been tamed for the use of the children discovered in the foreground. In every area of the painting, people can be discerned bringing some form of change to the environment in response to their own needs and desires.
The series continues with “The Course of Empire: Consumation.” In this painting, Cole moves away from the romanticized image of nature as well as away from his purely American scenes to focus on a classical river-scape. Only a hint of nature is suggested in the image at all in the form of headlands in the background on either side of the city that completely encloses the river that flows through the bottom half of the image. Cole again uses light to help guide his viewers through his painting, enabling the white facades of the colonnaded buildings to capture the eye in the bottom left and lead it along the river’s course to the blue sky and patchy white clouds of the upper right. Graceful pillars and triumphal statuary, most of them white or gold, is evident in several places throughout the city depicted and the stately procession of what appears to be a Roman official is seen crossing the elaborate bridge that helps this human civilization tame the river’s wildness. Red-sailed boats ride its glassy surface and the magnificent structures on either side appear more eternal than the natural river itself. A strangely shaped fountain found in the bottom right demonstrates man’s ability to tame the power of the water itself as it spits focused streams of water down into a basin.
With “The Course of Empire: Destruction,” Cole depicts a violent scene of utter annihilation of presumably this same city as it falls under the ravages of war. This idea is depicted most by the image of the headless white warrior statue that still stands in an attitude of attack in the lower right corner of the painting, leading the way in to the brilliant reds and oranges of the burning city and churning clouds. Rather than the serene and contained force it appeared in the two earlier paintings, the river has turned angry, churning up whitecaps as it leads straight out to sea from the viewer’s perspective and swallowing the breaking bridge in angry chunks and large foamy waves. Despite the knowledge that the water spray and the buildings lining the river are normally seen white, Cole paints them with an orange tint as they reflect the hue of the fires that rage through all of the visible structures, leaving the warrior statue, his head on the ground near his base and the tiny figure of a woman about to plunge into the river from a height in true white. As a result, it is these figures that grab the eye and force a strong diagonal line that operates in an opposite direction from Cole’s other paintings. When attempting to show progress, the light progresses from bottom left to upper right. In this painting depicting destruction, it moves from bottom right to upper left.
That this is a fair reading of Cole’s landscapes is proven by the final image in this series, “The Course of Empire: Desolation.” This landscape is unusual in that it is a landscape seen at night as a full moon hangs over the river, again proceeding up the middle ground of the image. The moonlight reflects on calm water surrounded again by overgrown foliage, black in the darkness but obviously growing and abundant. Within this foliage can be seen the ghostly wreckage of the buildings that had been seen in the earlier paintings – small remnants of the bridge left standing on one side of the river, a broken building façade on the other. The most prominent image is that of an unattached broken column in the immediate foreground that gleams with a mysterious light from the viewer’s side and becomes starkly white in the night. The bottom portion of the column is completely hidden in chocking black vines, but the way in which it angles up into a clearing sky suggests a temperate note of hopefulness that the next civilization will be more careful.
Another series Cole began in his later life was entitled, “The Voyage of Life.” Within this series is the painting entitled “Youth.” Painted in 1842, the oil on canvas measures approximately 53” x 76 ½.” In this painting, Cole combines many of the concepts he had demonstrated earlier to demonstrate a more pessimistic view of life. In this image, the landscape is presented as being green and abundant. The river ambles across the image from the lower right to the mid-left side of the painting, moving from shadow into light as it goes. However, there is also a glimmer of water in the background behind the trees in the central right, suggesting that there is just as much abundance at the youth’s point of departure as might be expected ahead. The main action of the image is that of a young man, brilliantly dressed in reds and riding in a boat of orange with a gold figurehead, departing the near bank and setting off for the airy castle in the sky Cole has painted into the sky area of the upper left. This youth leaves behind him an angel in brilliant white, again introducing the concept that all is perhaps not as it seems. From reading Cole’s earlier pieces, landscapes that depict light traversing from lower left to upper right are hopeful while those allowing light to move from lower right to upper left, as this one does, indicate trouble. In this instance, Cole allows hope for the youth to enter in the form of a column of light between the trees on the right in which the promise of water remains and at the bottom of which is the brilliant angel with one arm outstretched as if to encourage the youth to return.
Through a progressive study of the art of an individual influential artist such as Thomas Cole, one can begin to understand how the way in which landscapes were depicted and the use of water in these landscapes, served to establish relationships between cultures and convey hope or despair. Although each of Cole’s paintings can stand on their own as commentary on the period in which he lived, viewing them as a group makes it possible to understand how “The Oxbow” serves to draw a line between the European settlers and the savage natives or “The Course of Empire” draws parallels between the fallen Romans and the proud Americans. Shifts of light from one diagonal to another jump forward as obvious indicators of hope or despair while the condition of the water helps to indicate the mood of nature as it becomes energetic with storms, calm with harmonious living, constrained by too much development, angry in its unnatural bounds or tranquil in its assertion of its natural place.