Thomas Cole was a prodigiously talented landscape painter from youth.
It was he who would go on to invent
the American landscape painting tradition.
Cole was born in 1801 in the Lancashire mill town of BoltonleMoors.
Growing up in the midst of the Industrial Revolution,
he would have witnessed first-hand the pollution and destruction
of the natural environment caused by industrialisation.
Working in the textile industry,
he probably also saw the social impact;
the so-called Luddites;
workers destroying the machines which had replaced their labour.
British landscape painting was at its zenith
during the youth of Thomas Cole.
He could see great works by Constable,
Turner, John Martin,
Loutherbourg; painting the drama of the landscape,
but also an England under transformation in the Industrial Revolution,
full of fire and smoke.
After the Cole family emigrated to the United States in 1818,
Thomas Cole taught himself to paint.
He began to make his name painting the American wilderness
in scenes that exclude any sign of settlement or industry
or the kind of tourism that he would have seen
seen in the Hudson River Valley and the Catskill Mountains.
When he paints the Garden of Eden,
he uses the landscape of the American East coast,
combining it with the flora and fauna he would have seen
on an earlier trip to the Caribbean,
and in the botanical gardens of New York City.
It's not surprising that Cole should come back to England
to study landscape painting.
There was so much to be seen here at the Royal Academy,
at the brand new National Gallery,
and in studios around the city.
He would have seen, for example, sublime landscapes
by John Martin, full of elemental destruction,
landscapes in which allegory also plays its part.
In London, Cole met and became friends with John Constable.
Constable's fascination with clouds and weather effects
also rubbed off on Cole,
who would later say that skies are the soul of all scenery,
adding that American skies are unsurpassed.
London was not a great success for Cole.
He arrived wanting to be accepted as a professional artist,
but found he was received rather
as yet another student.
After a couple of years, he moved on south to Italy
It was there he discovered and took up
the landscape oil sketch.
It infused new energy into his art.
It gave him a tool to capture the brilliant Italian light
and the ruins of ancient Rome.
There, he learned important lessons
that he could carry back to America.
One of Cole's greatest achievements was the five-painting series,
'The Course of Empire'.
This was a new development for American painting; an allegorical landscape.
Each scene is set in the same imaginary landscape
with its distinctive mountain.
In 'The Savage State', we see huntsmen
and their hounds in a wilderness.
In 'The Arcadian or Pastoral State',
the huntsmen are replaced by shepherds and ploughmen in a field,
but there's also a tree stump warning of the cost of progress.
In 'The Consummation of Empire',
the largest painting in the series,
we see an emperor parading grandly across a bridge.
He's reminiscent of Roman emperors,
of British colonialism in India,
and also Cole's concerns about industrial growth
under the presidency of Andrew Jackson.
In 'Destruction', the great city burns under a tempestuous sky.
The citizens and soldiers battle as they're trapped by the broken bridge.
In the final scene, 'Desolation', human history has disappeared.
Nature reclaims the scene, healing the landscape.
'The Oxbow' is Cole's great American masterpiece.
Here, all the lessons he's learned come together in a
vast, ambitious painting
of a specifically American landscape,
this odd, natural formation in Massachusetts.
Cole has had a continuing influence on American painting
painting from the time of his death in 1848.
Generation after generation of American landscape painters,
and landscape is a central subject to American painting,
have looked back to the example of Cole.
That continues to today when, for example,
the Los Angeles artist Ed Ruscha acknowledges
a continuing debt to Cole's image of America
and of the American landscape.