Due to Thomas Cole’s great popularity after he was rediscovered in the 1940s, scholarly research on his art has produced a remarkable body of literature. The following overview is, therefore, concentrated on the most important texts for the topic of this present thesis, Cole’s journey to Italy and the works produced subsequently. While biographical and art historical accounts started directly after his death, he was virtually forgotten during the first half of the 20th century. 1 Rediscovered in the mid-century, research flourished in the 1980s and 1990s. The work comprises scholarly articles, monographs, and exhibition catalogs.
A number of published sources from Cole’s lifetime including his own writings help to reconstruct the painter’s biography and to understand his motivations to go abroad. More than other artists, Cole showed a commitment and skill to verbal expression. His essays, lectures and poems, mostly published in journals such as The Knickerbocker (New York), offer an insight into his aesthetical ideas and artistic work.2
Sicilian Scenery and Antiquities is such an essay, which can be regarded as a literary parallel to Thomas Cole’s painted landscapes of Sicily. He expressed in the text a romanticist view. It is a two-part essay Cole wrote after his trip to Sicily in 1843, published in The Knickerbocker in February of 1844.3 In the first part of the essay, Cole gives a brief outline of the history of Sicily along with a description of the Sicilian landscape and local conditions through his eyes. His adventure ascending Mount Etna is also recorded in this part. As for the second part, Cole focuses on
1 Alan Wallach, Review of “The Art of Thomas Cole, Ambition and Imagination by Ellwood C. Parry,”
in: Archives of American Art Journal 28, no. 4, 1988, pp. 21–25, here p. 21.
2 On Thomas Cole as a writer see Joy S. Kasson, “Thomas Cole,” in: Eric L. Haralson (ed.),
Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, New York and London: Routledge, 1998, pp. 89–92.
3 Thomas Cole, “Sicilian Scenery and Antiquities,” in: The Knickerbocker, New-York Monthly Magazine 23, no. 2, February, 1844, pp. 103-113; no. 3, March, 1844, pp. 236–244.
architectural antiquities of Sicily, portraying the ancient structures he visited, ending with his cautionary advice. Cole’s essay is a romantic depiction of nature with a slight influence of man, presenting the beauty of the natural landscape and, at the same time, stressing the intertwined past and future of man and nature.
Reverend Louis Legrand Noble (1813–1882) was not only Thomas Cole’s pastor at Saint Luke’s Episcopal Church in Catskill, but also a close friend who knew the artist personally.4 Noble published his biography on Cole under the title The Course of Empire, Voyage of Life and Other Pictures of Thomas Cole in 1853, providing an intimate portrait of the artist as a commemoration after the latter’s death. The third edition was differently titled The Life and Works of Thomas Cole, published three years later in 1856.5 Containing Thomas Cole’s own essays, poems, journals, correspondence and descriptions of his paintings, the importance of this biography lies in the fact that it is a primary source of Cole’s life.
In 1834, William Dunlap (1766–1839) self-published his A History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States, making him the very first American to write a book on the history of art in the United States.6 His book is a relatively random collection of biographies of early American artists with commentary, which offers a valuable record of the period. Cole let Dunlap edit some of his letters, among them also one on Cole’s first trip to Italy, which is included in a chapter on Cole in the third volume of A History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts
4 John Dillenberger, The visual arts and Christianity in America: from the colonial period to the present, New York: Crossroad, 1989, p. 77.
5 Louis Legrand Noble, The Course of Empire, Voyage of Life and Other Pictures of Thomas Cole, N.A.
(New York, 1853); 3rd ed. 1856; new edition Louis Legrand Noble, The Life and Works of Thomas Cole, ed. by Elliot S. Vesell, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1964.
6 An analysis of Dunlap’s History is to be found in Maura Lyons’s monograph on Dunlap; Maura Lyons, William Dunlap and the construction of an American art history, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005; for Dunlap and his way of collecting artists’ narratives, as well as for his relationship to Cole, see especially p. 60.
of Design in the United States.7
In one of his fictional letters from Europe, published as a kind of travelogue under the title Notions of the Americans, Picked up by a Travelling Bachelor in 1828, none other than American writer James Fenimore Cooper, later better known for his Leatherstocking Tales, briefly comments on Thomas Cole and his landscapes.8 Cooper’s commentary begins by promising Cole a great future as a landscapist, continued by praising his taste and skill in idealizing the scenery, finally ending with the expectation of Cole to continue to study from nature. Since the 1950s, scholars occasionally highlighted common features in Cole’ paintings and Cooper’s texts when depicting landscape.9 Cole and Cooper used a device that Donald Ringe called
“landscape series” to imply the passage of time in a single picture or description, fulfilling the purpose of delivering a moral theme within their works.10
Edited by John Bard McNulty (1916–2015), The Correspondence of Thomas Cole and Daniel Wadsworth presents a small selection of letters between Cole and Hartford artist Daniel Wadsworth (1771–1848), today preserved in the Watkinson Library, Trinity College, Hartford, and in the New York State Library, Albany, New York, in chronological order, including the text of nineteen unpublished letters dating mostly from 1826 to 1828. A letter written by Cole in Florence on July 13th, 1832, bears particular importance to this study.11 In this letter, Cole mentions his trip to Italy, as well as the painting of ruined aqueducts he was working on at that time.
In 1988, Ellwood C. Parry III published his monograph on Thomas Cole titled The Art of Thomas Cole: Ambition and Imagination in attempt to achieve a more
7 Dunlap, 1918, pp. 138–159; the account on the Italian journey is to be found on the pp. 153–155.
8 James Fenimore Cooper, Notions of the Americans, Picked up by a Travelling Bachelor, 2 vols., London, 1828, here vol. 2, pp. 156–157; James F. Beard, Jr., “Cooper and his Artistic Contemporaries,”
in: New York History 35, no. 4, 1954, pp. 480–495.
9 See the literature cited in the article of Donald A. Ringe, “James Fenimore Cooper and Thomas Cole:
An Analogous Technique,” in: American Literature 30, no. 1, 1958, pp. 26–36.
10 Ibid., p. 27.
11 McNulty, Letters, 1983, no. 26 (Florence, July 13th, 1832), pp. 56–57.
profound understanding of Cole’s accomplishments and his preeminent place in American painting of the mid-19th century. Being the first full account of Cole’s life and work since Noble’s biography, Parry’s eight-chaptered monograph is important for the present study as it gathers a plethora of primary sources, from Cole’s own artworks and letters to observations by his peers, to reconstruct Cole’s life. The book is on the one hand a chronological study of Cole’s œuvre and a biographical record of the painter’s life from 1825 till his death in 1848, and an iconographic study of Cole’s most important works on the other. As an illustrated catalog, however, it lacks a more careful systematic record of the relevant information for every work and it remains in many respects without the necessary in-depth evaluation of the assembled sources. As reviewer Alan Wallach, himself co-editor and co-author of a major exhibition catalog of 1994 dedicated to Cole,12 appropriately remarked, the use of this book is difficult as its author attempted to integrate different methodological approaches—
biographical, stylistic and iconographical—into a strictly chronological order.13
American art historian and museum director Earl Alexander Powell III authored a monograph on Thomas Cole published in 1990.14 Revealing the life and theories of Cole, Powell’s book concentrates on Cole’s works and their inspirational roots in the artist’s English contemporaries, the earlier French masters and the landscape of the American East.
Published in 1981, Matthew Baigell’s Thomas Cole offers an overview of Cole’s life and work.15 After a concise chronology, Baigell introduces Cole and his career through its informative essay, proceeded by a catalog of Cole’s major works. The
12 Alan Wallach, “Thomas Cole: Landscape and the Course of American Empire,” in: William H.
Truettner and Alan Wallach (eds.), Thomas Cole: Landscape into History, New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 1994, pp. 23–111.
13 Wallach, 1988, pp. 21–25, here p. 22.
14 Earl Alexander Powell, Thomas Cole, New York: H.N. Abrams, 1990.
15 Matthew Baigell, Thomas Cole, New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 1981.
introductory essay not only outlines Cole’s career, but also uncovers the content and method of his work, as well as tells of the artist’s place and influence in early American art.
The Lure of Italy: American Artists and the Italian Experience, 1760-1914 is an exhibition catalog edited by Theodore Stebbins and published in 1992.16 This significant travelling exhibition opened at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and proceeded to the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Some of Cole’s major Italian landscape paintings executed in Italy or after the trips were present at the show including Dream of Arcadia (1838; fig. 10),17 L’Allegro (1845),18 Il Penseroso (1845),19 Interior of the Colosseum, Rome (about 1832),20 Aqueduct near Rome (1832; fig. 3),21 Mount Etna from Taormina (1843; fig. 27),22 A View near Tivoli (1832),23 View of Florence from San Miniato (1837),24 and Salvator Rosa Sketching Banditti (about 1832–40).25 Stebbins’s opening article contains a consistent paragraph on “Thomas Cole and the Hudson River School in Italy”
discussing the vedute Cole had produced under the impression of the Italian landscape experienced on the two trips.26
16 Theodore Ellis Stebbins (ed.), The Lure of Italy: American Artists and the Italian Experience, 1760-1914, exhibition catalog, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: The Cleveland Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1992/93, Boston: Museum of Fine Arts; New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992.
17 Dream of Arcadia, oil on canvas, 98.11 × 159.38 cm, Denver Art Museum, Denver, Colorado, inv.
1954.71.
18 L’Allegro, oil on canvas, 81.6 × 121.8 cm, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California, signed and dated lower right: “T. Cole. / 1845.”
19 Il Penseroso, oil on canvas, 82.2 × 122.1 cm, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California, signed and dated lower right: “T. Cole / 1845.”
20 Interior of the Colosseum, Rome, oil on canvas, 25.4 × 45.72 cm, Albany Institute of History and Art, Albany, New York, inv. 1964.71.
21 Aqueduct near Rome, oil on canvas, 113 × 171.2 cm, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in Saint Louis, inv. WU 1987.4.
22 Mount Etna from Taormina, oil on canvas, 199.71 × 306.39 cm, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut, signed and dated: “T. Cole / 1843;” purchase, inv. 1844.6.
23 A View near Tivoli, oil on canvas, 37.5 × 58.7cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, inv.
03.27.
24 View of Florence from San Miniato, oil on canvas, 99.50 × 160.40 cm, The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio, signature at the lower right: “T C.”
25 Salvator Rosa Sketching Banditti, oil on panel, 17.78 × 24.13 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
26 Stebbins, 1992, pp. 42–54.
Eleanor Jones Harvey’s exhibition catalog, The Painted Sketch: American Impressions from Nature, 1830-1880 (Dallas Museum of Art, in June, 1998), was the first major publication focusing on the oil sketches of eight of America’s leading painters belonging to the Hudson River School.27 The catalog offers not only an insightful history of the various applications of oil sketches by the respective artists including Thomas Cole, but also a novel interpretation of this genre of preliminary draft, which was usually executed on site. Besides serving as preparatory sketches in the development of studio canvases, demonstrating how artists arrived at their final paintings, the oil sketch has gradually been considered an independent work of art, an artistic production in its own right. Regarding Thomas Cole, Harvey discusses a few of his oil studies as well as Cole’s portable sketch box, a piece of evidence showing the artist worked en plein air.28 For this context, her discussion of Cole’s Campagna di Roma (1832; fig. 13)29 and The Ruins at Taormina (1842; fig. 29)30 are of importance to this study.
John F. McGuigan, Jr.’s article, “A Painter’s Paradise”: Thomas Cole and his Transformative Experience in Florence, 1831–1832, concentrates on Cole’s first trip to Italy, particularly on his sojourn in Florence.31 The author examines the crucial twelve months Cole lived and worked in Florence, providing a vivid reconstruction of Cole’s life there, backed up by documents such as letters and diaries of Cole and his contemporaries. McGuigan believes Cole benefited much from Scottish landscape painter George Augustus Wallis (1770–1847), whose influence was no less than that
27 Eleanor Jones Harvey (ed.), The Painted Sketch: American Impressions from Nature, 1830-1880, Dallas Museum of Art in association with H.N. Abrams, 1998, p. 6.
28 Ibid., p. 120.
29 Campagna di Roma (Study for Aqueduct near Rome), oil on paper mounted on canvas, 21.59 × 29.21 cm, Alexander Gallery, New York; signed on the lower left: “T.C.”
30 The Ruins at Taormina, oil and pencil on board, 30.48 × 40.96 cm, Berry-Hill Galleries, Inc., New York.
31 John F. McGuigan, Jr., “‘A Painter’s Paradise’: Thomas Cole and His Transformative Experience in Florence, 1831-1832,” in: Sirpa Salenius (ed.), Sculptors, Painters and Italy: Italian Influence on Nineteenth American Art, Il Prato, 2009, pp. 37–52.
of Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa.32 Besides supplementing Parry’s book with more precise details, McGuigan’s article also corrects some inaccuracies in it.
McGuigan considers Cole’s time spent in Italy to be rewarding and of great importance towards his art.
Thomas Cole: The Artist as Architect was published to accompany the exhibition of 2016 at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site. This catalog provides an analysis of Cole’s architectural pursuits and their influence on his painting, including an essay by the curator, Annette Blaugrund, briefly mentioning the impact of Cole’s Italian journeys on his art. During Cole’s visits to Italy, he saw the ruins of the area, which not only fascinated him but changed his art as well.33
The goal of my study is to concentrate on a selection of Thomas Cole’s Italian landscapes, including Aqueduct near Rome (1832; fig. 3) and The Temple of Segesta with the Artist Sketching (1843; fig. 1), and to connect them with the two Italian journeys Cole made. The common theme of these landscapes is the ruined structure settled within an Arcadian-like environment. The way the ruins are depicted and their importance for Cole’s paintings is to be further looked into. Furthermore, it will be asked what visual and literary models shaped Cole’s ideas of landscape painting. How did he approach Italy? What was the country for him? What were his main goals when travelling there? What is essential is the research on the parallels between the paintings as first sources and Cole’s own accounts, especially his essay Sicilian Scenery and Antiquities of 1844. Before, however, I shall strive to undertake an in-depth analysis of the paintings and their genesis, exploring the painter’s approach from the sketches produced on site to the final paintings executed afterwards in the studio and later replicas of the same subjects.
32 McGuigan, 2009, p. 47.
33 Annette Blaugrund, “Thomas Cole: The Unknown Architect,” in: Annette Blaugrund, Thomas Cole:
The Artist as Architect, New York: The Monacelli Press, 2016, pp. 13–79, here p. 22.
3. Thomas Cole’s Journeys to Italy