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.
CHURCH, PAINTER OF NOBLE SCENERY
Metropolitan Museum of Art
THE ÆGEAN SEA, BY F. E. CHURCH
The best known of these followers was F. E. Church, who was a pupil of Cole—and the only pupil that he could properly be said to have had; for Church lived and studied in his house for years. While he showed no desire to imitate the mystic subjects of his master, Church cared little for the common world immediately around him. He seems to have thought that the nobler the subject the nobler the picture, and he ransacked the whole earth for its beautiful, strange, or impressive scenes. The luxurious vegetation of the tropics, the isles of the Ægean Sea, the Parthenon, icebergs, volcanos,—he painted them all, set off by sunset, clouds, thunderstorms, rainbows, or whatever else would enhance their beauty, and he painted them well. He was the best artist of his school; much better than Cole, whose careful studies of real scenes are often well done, but whose workmanship degenerated rapidly when, leaving nature, he entered into the realm of pure imagination.
The succeeding men who took Church’s viewpoint and sought subjects for their exceptional beauty or majesty had an additional impulse given to their imagination by the discovery of such subjects in their own country. Church painted no important picture of his own land; but when exploring parties began to enter the great West they were accompanied by artists eager to set down marvels no less striking than those of the tropics or of Europe.
ALBERT BIERSTADT
