Thomas Cole's Landscapes
I recently published an article with Plough on Thomas Cole’s landscapes as instructions for for humanity to live well together with nature. I’ve included the first few paragraphs here, but go give it a read on Plough’s website!
Can a landscape painting provide its viewer with guidance on how to live well with creation?
In the past ten years, people of faith have begun to take caring for the environment more seriously. But Thomas Cole (1801–1848), a British-American Protestant landscape painter and founder of the Hudson River School, paved the way nearly two centuries years ago with insight into our relationship to creation.
Cole’s personal history affected his view of the natural world and industrialization. He grew up witnessing a radically anti-industrial movement led by a faction called the Luddites in his home of Lancashire in northwestern England. His family emigrated from England to the United States in 1818, settling first in Ohio before moving farther northeast.
By the time Cole arrived in the Hudson Valley in 1825, the valley’s natural wilderness was in danger of being lost to industrialization. Local tanneries were dumping waste into the Hudson River, hemlock and bluestone were being extracted by the barge load, and high demand for wood and charcoal caused were causing mass deforestation throughout the river’s watershed. Much of Cole’s painting and writing laments American industrialization and human exploitation of the land.
Cole painted large-scale landscapes of the wilderness in all its forms in the Northeast: rolling, grassy fields, hazy blue mountains, and heavy clouds looming with the dark thrill of a wild storm over the countryside. A significant detail can be found in many of his paintings, especially those captured in the Northeastern wilderness he sought to protect: Cole included small, detailed figures beholding the grandeur of the landscape, walking through it as if on a journey, or even making a home in it.
By all accounts, he was aware of humanity’s destruction of the Hudson Valley. Why, then, did he continue to include people in his landscapes as he did? Cole answers by suggesting that it is possible for humanity to live well with nature.