Facts about Thomas Cole

1. 10

   Cole's correspondence reveals he spent the final years of his life designing a monumental allegorical painting titled The Cross and the World, which remained unfinished at his death in 1848.

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2. 09

   At age thirty-two, Thomas Cole founded the National Academy of Design in New York City in 1826, serving as its first president and establishing the institution that would train generations of American artists.

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3. 08

   Cole's 1833 painting The White Mountain series documented the artist's obsessive return to New Hampshire's peaks across multiple seasons to capture different atmospheric and lighting conditions.

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4. 07

   Thomas Cole's 1828 painting Expulsion from the Garden of Eden measured approximately six feet tall and depicted a dramatically lit scene combining religious narrative with sublime wilderness imagery characteristic of his mature style.

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5. 06

   Cole's allegorical painting The Architect's Dream, exhibited in 1840, featured a young man envisioning grand classical and gothic structures, reflecting the artist's own architectural ambitions and philosophical interests.

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6. 05

   Born in 1801 in Lancashire, England, Thomas Cole immigrated to Philadelphia at age seventeen and later settled in Catskill, New York, where he became a central figure in American landscape painting.

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7. 04

   Cole's five-painting series The Voyage of Life, completed between 1842 and 1848, depicted the human journey through childhood, youth, manhood, and old age using allegorical landscape imagery.

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8. 03

   During an 1841 sketching trip to upstate New York, Thomas Cole suffered a severe illness that permanently weakened his health and limited his artistic output for the final decade of his life.

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9. 02

   The Hudson River School movement, which Thomas Cole founded in the 1820s, established landscape painting as a major American art form distinct from European traditions.

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10. 01

    In 1836, painter Thomas Cole completed The Oxbow, a five-by-seven-foot landscape depicting the Connecticut River's dramatic bend near Northampton, Massachusetts.

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