Thomas Cole, (born February 1, 1801, Bolton-le-Moors, Lancashire, England—died February 11, 1848, Catskill, New York, U.S.), American Romantic landscape painter who was a founder of the Hudson River school.
Cole’s family immigrated first to Philadelphia and then settled in Steubenville, Ohio. He was trained by an itinerant portrait painter named Stein and then spent two years at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In 1825 some of Cole’s landscapes in a New York shop window attracted the attention of Colonel John Trumbull and the painter Asher B. Durand. They bought his works and found him patrons, assuring his future success.
In 1826 Cole made his home in the village of Catskill, New York, on the western bank of the Hudson River. From there he frequently journeyed through the Northeast, primarily on foot, making pencil studies of the landscape. He used these sketches to compose paintings in his studio during the winter. One of Cole’s most effective landscape paintings, The Ox-Bow (1846), was the result of pencil studies that he made in Massachusetts. Cole’s scenes of the Hudson River valley, reverently recorded, echo the loneliness and mystery of the North American forests. Cole could paint direct and factual landscapes recorded in minute detail, but he was also capable of producing grandiose and dramatic imaginary vistas using bold effects of light and chiaroscuro. When the human figure appears in his works, it is always subordinate to the majesty of the surrounding landscape.
Cole spent the years 1829–32 and 1841–42 abroad, mainly in Italy. He lived in Florence with the American sculptor Horatio Greenough. When Cole returned to the United States, he painted five huge canvases for a series titled The Course of Empire (1836). These paintings are allegories on the progress of mankind based on the count de Volney’s Ruines; ou, méditations sur les révolutions des empires (1791). A second series, called The Voyage of Life (begun 1839), depicts a symbolic journey from infancy to old age in four scenes. Shortly before he died, Cole began still another series, The Cross of the World, which was of a religious nature.