Free Republic

Thomas Cole is known primarily as the father of the Hudson River School of landscape painting. Cole enjoyed the patronage of several prominent businessmen in New York City, and they would have been particularly interested in his depictions of the seemingly limitless resources of the country’s interior—the profusion of timber and the extensive network of rivers and lakes that would enable them to make their fortunes. They believed that settlement of the land would have nothing but beneficial effects. It is Cole’s skill as an artist that enables him both to create an image that would both appeal to...

"The Hudson River School was a mid-19th century American art movement embodied by a group of landscape painters whose aesthetic vision was influenced by Romanticism. The paintings for which the movement is named depict the Hudson River Valley and the surrounding area, including the Catskill, Adirondack, and White Mountains; eventually works by the second generation of artists associated with the school expanded to include other locales in New England, the Maritimes, the American West, and South America."--Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson_River_School

"Thomas Cole, America's premier landscape painter of the 1820's and 1830's, constructed the idea for his series, The Course of Empire, from a variety of influences. He began his intense study of Europe and its art in 1829 by sailing to England, where he met and talked with influential artists such as J.M.W. Turner and John Martin. He studied the works of those artists and others in the British galleries of the time. Scholars recognize today that those artists' influence upon him was strikingly pervasive. Cole also felt the perishability of man's works when he traveled in Europe and saw...