THOMAS COLE, THE IDEALIST
Metropolitan Museum of Art
THE VALLEY OF VAN CLUSE, BY THOMAS COLE
Soon after came Thomas Cole, the real founder of the school, who emigrated to America with his father’s family when he was nineteen. He was a sensitive, delicate youth, who suffered much in his wanderings while trying to support himself, at first by his trade of wood engraving, but most of all after the chance meeting with an itinerant portrait painter led him to take up art. It was not until he came to New York in 1825 that his merits were recognized and his difficulties ceased. Some small canvases that he exhibited were quickly bought, and from this time until his death his popularity steadily increased. The quality of Cole’s work owes much to his own character, and perhaps also to his early English bringing up. He was an idealist rather than a realist. He cared less to reproduce the beauties of the nature around him than to awaken high, moral thoughts. It was not for the pleasure of the eye, but to suggest profitable musings on the grandeur and decline of nations, the transitoriness of life, the rewards of virtue after death, that he painted the “Course of Empire,” the “Voyage of Life,” and the rest. He was the founder of a romantic school, which may be traced even down to the present day. The succeeding artists did not indeed paint allegories; but they put the main interest of their pictures in the strangeness or beauty of their subject, rather than in rendering ordinary scenes with personal feeling.