| Thomas Cole is regarded as the founder of the Hudson River School of Landscape painting, and in the nineteenth century, he became one of America's best-known artists. But Cole was more than just an artist and he was not born in America. He spent the first seventeen years of his life in England and migrated to the United States in 1818 with his parents and three of his seven sisters. The hardships of the family's life in Lancashire followed them to America as they moved about from Pennsylvania to Ohio, and finally to New York in 1825---the same year that the Erie Canal opened. Various forms of entrepreneurship, such as the Canal, steam travel, book publishing, and hostelry, coincided with the Romanticist ideas of the sublime and beautiful to create opportunities for wealth and invigorate a new appreciation of the American landscape. Cole captured that spirit of America in his Landscape paintings. A strong creative impulse drove him to pursue a number of other talents that included writing, architecture, music, and invention, and many of the men with whom he associated also possessed multiple talents. The connections between those talents, and between the men themselves, were an integral part of the first half of the nineteenth century, not just from the standpoint of their artistic contributions, but also because they saw their work as a means of improving the moral character of individuals, and society as a whole. They frequently referred to the process of moral improvement through the arts and sciences as "refinement." The purpose of this dissertation is to understand how and why Cole in particular, and his colleagues in general, pursued multiple talents; how they used them in the hope of refining individuals and society; and to set historical context. The vast majority of scholarship on Thomas Cole has been from the perspective of Art History, but what follows here is a look at Cole by an historian. His life and work, as well as the lives and work of his colleagues, helped to define American culture in the nineteenth century, and beyond. |
