Thomas Cole (1801-1848) was the father of the Hudson River School. His virtuoso landscapes first captured young America’s ambivalence about its vast wilderness: Was this a paradise, a giant Garden of Eden, or a savage land in need of taming?
Despite his patriarchal role, Cole has had less museum exposure than followers like Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Church. This is the first show in New York City since the artist’s death.
The reason is that Cole had a side to his art that was totally inconsistent with what we now think of as the Hudson River tradition. Yes, he was a master of immense natural vistas crammed with dazzling details, but his heart was really in moral allegories such as the “Voyage of Life” and “The Course of Empire.”
The exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum, organized by the Smithsonian’s Museum of American Art in Washington, gives us both sides of Cole, including those two famous series, which have never been shown together.
Cole was an amazing artist. He was mostly self-taught and never really learned to paint the human figure. Yet he mastered landscape in every facet, and, unlike many landscape painters, was able to paint from imagination.
In paintings like “The Falls of Kaaterskill” (1826), he gives us primeval America. A cataract tumbles down a rocky cliff, splintering dead trees and sending up an explosion of froth. In “Tornado in the Wilderness,” nature rages out of control, tugging at the top of a huge birch. But with the exception of the tiny figure of a man, his red scarf snapping in the wind, the setting is so wild and desolate that it hardly seems to matter what destruction is wrought.
In other paintings, the viewer has the sense of participating in America’s settlement. Daniel Boone and his log cabin look about to be swallowed up by trees and brush. But nature gives way, and in the spacious “Home in the Woods” (1847), man is in ascendancy. The happy domesticity of the scene – the wife on the threshold greeting the husband with his catch of fish – could be from a Dutch genre painting. The conquest is complete in those paintings – commissioned by wealthy patrons – where the wilderness has yielded for a veritable estate, as in “The Van Rensselaer Manor House” (1841).
Cole was a romantic. Even in the most naturalistic works, there is a sense that nature has been tinkered with, dramatized, and enhanced. The figures, when larger than an inch, are clumsily done. They seem to decorate the canvas rather than inhabit it. And yet, one doesn’t mind, because Cole invests his subjects with something more valuable than verisimilitude: a quality of imagination. That deviation from pure realism prepares the viewer for the leap into allegorical fantasy.
“The Voyage of Life” is a four-panel series that makes a literal translation of a poetic metaphor. A babe sets out on a golden boat under the guardianship of an angel. In “Youth,” he leaves the angel on the shore and sails toward an imaginary kingdom in the sky. In the dark scenario of “Manhood,” the boat is pulled toward deadly rapids, only to wind up in a peaceful harbor in “Old Age,” with the doors of heaven opening above. The whole sequence is so corny that it brings a smile to your face. And yet, at the same time, you can’t help nodding at how true it is. Certain details stick in the mind: the hugely exaggerated flowers in “Childhood,” the fairy-tale sweetness of the dreams of “Youth,” and the comically dire circumstances of “Manhood.”
Although Cole lived during the Jacksonian period, he didn’t believe in its gospel of progress. In “The Course of Empire,” he preached the inevitability of decline, from the raw primitive beauty of “The Savage State,” to the natural harmony of the “Arcadian State,” to the wildly decadent excesses of “The Empire,” and finally to “Destruction” and “Desolation.”
Once again, the imagery – especially in the scenes of decadence and war – have the corniness of a Cecil B. De Mille production. Yet again, you are inclined to overlook this out of a sympathy for the grandness of the overall vision. The plot gets a bit hokey, it’s true, but the first two paintings in the series, the savage and arcadian states, are worthy of Claude Lorrain, and the last, with its pale violet sky and solitary column glistening in the moonlight, is endowed with a profound, unforgettable sadness.
Cole died after a brief illness at the age of 47. At the end of his life, his allegorical paintings had taken on a religious character. In place of faith in democracy and material progress, he had found the promise of individual salvation.
Brooklyn Museum
1995
