Hudson River Thomas Cole School. 19th Century American Oil on Panel. Follower of Thomas Cole (1801-1848) New York / England, Oil on Panel. Depicting a country landscape with a stone bridge. Provenance: from a Private Collection, UK. Overall Size: 12 x 15 1/4 in. Sight Size: 9 3/4 x 12 3/4 in. #8005 Thomas Cole was born on February 1, 1801 in Bolton-le-Moors, Lancashire, England. He was the shy and sensitive son of an English immigrant who settled in Steubenville, Ohio, where he arrived in 1818. He had set up shop as a wallpaper maker, and Thomas helped his father with designs and was shown how to paint likenesses by an itinerant portrait painter who traveled from town to town in early America. He set out to be a traveling portrait painter himself. Yet as he rested by the roadside he found himself powerfully drawn to the wilderness surrounding him, he decided to become a landscape painter and left for New York City where prosperous merchants were eager to purchase paintings for their new mansions. During the summer he embarked on what was to be one of many sketching trips up the Hudson River Valley. Cole studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1823 and in 1825 he moved to New York where he was discovered by John Trumbull, William Dunlap and Asher Durand who saw his sketches of the Hudson River Valley and the Catskill Mountains in a shop window. They bought a painting, and his reputation was made. The landscapes he painted from 1825 onward sold almost as fast as the oil was dry, and made Cole the founder of the Hudson River school of landscapists. With success, and yielding to the moralistic temper of the times, Cole in his later years immersed himself in elaborate allegories, for which he was widely acclaimed by his contemporaries. He typically used the image of the Native American as a symbol of untamed nature. His racism was well documented and deeply entrenched. Cole was elected a member of the National Academy in 1826. He was represented in the Metropolitan Museum and the Corcoran Museum in Washington, D.C. In addition to his activites as a painter, Cole was a prolific poet, writer and theorist. He kept many journals and wrote poetry and essays, including a well-known tract on American scenery of 1835. He eventually settled in the village of Catskill, New York, marrying Maria Bartow in 1837. His relatively brief life had been a busy round of travel, exhibitions, commissions, lectures and publications. He even found time to act as mentor to the young Hudson Frederick Church. He had an influential role in the New York art community, and fostered the careers of many River School artists. He was especially close to Asher Durand. Cole's unexpected death on February 11 in 1848 at the age of forty-seven was deeply mourned in New York art and literary circles. Both his art and his legacy provided the foundation for the native landscape school that dominated American painting until the late 1860s. Location O