Living in Cole’s Fourth Painting

Thomas Cole, Kaaterskill Falls, 1826

On Wednesday (September 22) I am flying east for a week-long research trip. I’m taking a closer look at the Hudson River School (1825 -1870) as a way to think about how and why the American landscape has changed in the 200 years since the Hudson River School artists described the vast open spaces that rolled out before them. I’m looking at how climate change, land privitization and land-use has altered the landscape, what we have lost, and what we likely will lose if we continue on the path we have already laid.

The Hudson River School was a mid-19th century, Romantic painting movement (or what the Met describes as “America’s first true artistic fraternity”) that depicted the Hudson River Valley in New York and surrounding mountain areas, but also the western US and South America. They depicted an idealized vision of the open, pastoral, American landscape, and focused on the themes of the sublime, manifest destiny, unlimited resources, prosperity, and settlement (or colonialism and genocide).

The leader or founder of the movement, Thomas Cole, saw not only opportunites in the landscape, but also the imminent distruction of it. For three years he worked on an allegorical cycle of paintings he titled “The Course of Empire”. Cole wrote about this cycle in a letter to his patron Lumen Reed:

A series of pictures might be painted that should illustrate the History of a natural scene, as well as be an Epitome of Man—showing the natural changes of Landscape & those effected by man in his progress from Barbarism to Civilization, to Luxury, the Vicious state or state of destruction and to the state of Ruin & Desolation.

The philosophy of my subject is drawn from the history of the past, wherein we see how nations have risen from the Savage state to that of Power & Glory & then fallen & become extinct...

(Cole to Lumen Reed, 18 September 1833, NYSL; quoted in Foshay, Mr. Luman Reed's Picture Gallery, 130.)

I think most of us would agree that we are now living in Cole’s fourth painting, The Course of Empire: Destruction (hurricanes, wildfires, rising temperatures, the loss of forests and ice sheets, international crises, January 6), and are on our way to the fifth: Desolation.

Thomas Cole - Destruction from The Course of Empire - 1836

In the series of works I create next, I want to look back from Destruction with the hope that we can recognize what we did that got us here, and what we need to do to avoid Desolation.

On Wednesday I fly to Washington DC, where I have an appointment at the National Gallery on Thursday to look at 15 works-on-paper created by Hudson River School artists Thomas Cole, Thomas Moran, Samuel Coleman, Asher Brown Durand, John Frederick Kensett, and a 50 page sketchbook by Albert Bierstadt. And I will look at the Hudson River School paintings that are on view in the galleries.

From there I will travel to New York, for an appointment at the NY Historical Society to view works-on-paper by Asher Brown Durand, Albert Bierstadt, John William Hill and William Guy Hall, as well as their works on view. I’ll go to the MET to view their collection of works from the Hudson River School. I will then head up to the Hudson River Valley itself, hiking to some of the sites where these artists painted. And I’ll visit the homes of Thomas Cole and Frederick Church.

I hope you’ll come along with me.