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21 Feb - 19 May 2002
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Introduction
| Room Guide
| Maps
| Timeline
| Biographies
| Literature
| Events
Bierstadt
| Church
| Cole
| Cropsey
| Durand
| Gifford
| Heade
| Kensett
| Lane
| Moran
Thomas Cole
Born 1 February 1801, Bolton, Lancashire, England
Died 11 February 1848, Catskill, New York
| Thomas Cole was born in the north of England, the son of a successful textile manufacturer who emigrated with his family to the United States in 1818. Cole received basic training as a portrait painter in Ohio, then studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, before setting up a studio in New York. The paintings resulting from his first sketching trip up the Hudson River to the Catskill Mountains brought him rapid success. In 1829 Cole travelled to Europe, including southern Italy, where he became especially interested in antiquity and ruins. Back at home, a wealthy New York grocer called Luman Reed commissioned several works including The Course of Empire, displayed in this exhibition. Sketching trips to wilderness areas in the Adirondacks and elsewhere provided material for successful landscape paintings throughout the rest of Cole's career, though from the 1804s his work became increasingly religious. He died suddenly in 1848, aged 47.
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