Thomas Cole

File: 'The Return' -Thomas Cole [1837] [Compressed].jpg (2MB, 4000x2472px) Image search: [Google]

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>>2753533

File: 'Past' -Thomas Cole.jpg (2MB, 2102x1351px) Image search: [Google]

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Next we have another two part series, "Past" and "Present". Like the last series, these next two are appearing on /hr/ in this quality for the first time.

>In this pair of paintings, Thomas Cole tells the story of one setting affected by the passage of time. The Past depicts a courtly jousting contest on a summer day. From the colorful throng of spectators to the travelers on the distant road, the landscape teems with people. In contrast, the same scene in The Present contains only a lonely goatherd tending his flock. Now long abandoned, the castle lies in ivy-covered ruins, and water covers the fairground. Nature reclaims the land that humans overran in The Past.

File: 'Present' -Thomas Cole.jpg (2MB, 2123x1385px) Image search: [Google]

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>>2753541

File: 'A Wild Scene' -Thomas Cole.jpg (1MB, 3654x2399px) Image search: [Google]

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"A Wild Scene":

>a large picture representing a romantic country, or perfect state of nature, with appropriate savage figures. It is a scene of no particular land, but a general idea of a wild.

File: 'Expulsion From the Garden of Eden' -Thomas Cole [Compressed].jpg (7MB, 6001x4337px) Image search: [Google]

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"Expulsion from the Garden of Eden"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBrKCtx4TfA&feature=youtu.be

File: 'A View near Tivoli (Morning)' -Thomas Cole [1832].jpg (731KB, 2000x1276px) Image search: [Google]

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"A View near Tivoli (Morning)"

File: 'A View of the Mountain Pass Called the Notch of the White Mountains (Crawford Notch)' -Thomas Cole [1839] [Compressed].jpg (8MB, 4000x2601px) Image search: [Google]

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"Crawford Notch"

>Cole's painting depicts the site of an earlier landslide whose destruction prompted the victims – Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Willey and their five children, along with two farmhands – to immediately leave their home in Crawford Notch and construct what they thought would be a safe haven close by. Instead, they ran into the very path of disaster - the next night's avalanche struck their temporary refuge. A rescue party arriving the next day searched feverishly for the family. The bodies of Mr. and Mrs. Willey, two children, and the farmhands were eventually located, but no trace of the other three children was ever found.

>Crawford Notch is thought to allude to this dramatic and tragic episode as emblematic of man's frailty in the face of the vast and unpredictable forces of nature—a theme Cole often explored in his landscapes. Amid this seemingly idyllic autumnal setting, the painting's diminutive human figures appear oblivious to the possibility of tragedy. A man on a black horse rides along a path zig-zagging through the picture space; two figures and a dog stand outside the well-known Notch House Inn and in the distance a stagecoach is about to pass through the notch. Yet evidence of nature's destructive potential is everywhere apparent: the twisted trees of the foreground, the skeletal, gesturing dead trees of the middle distance, the V-shape form of the notch (seemingly riven by some supernatural process), and the dark, sweeping storm clouds at the upper left.

>For Cole, ever fascinated by the multiplicity of meanings embedded in landscape, Crawford Notch was a subject rich with possibilities: a family's harrowing misfortune, the power of natural forces, the passing of time. In Crawford Notch the artist successfully integrated these various threads of content into a richly textured whole. At once vibrant, vital, and beautiful, the painting is also provocatively expressive of instability, change, and uncertainty.

File: 'A View of the Two Lakes and Mountain House, Catskill Mountains, Morning' -Thomas Cole [Compressed].jpg (7MB, 4995x3329px) Image search: [Google]

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"A View of the Two Lakes and Mountain House, Catskill Mountains, Morning"

>Nestled in this panoramic landscape by Thomas Cole is the popular focal point of Catskill tourism—the Mountain House, opened in 1824. The title designates the time to be morning—recalling the fact that Mountain House visitors were routinely roused at daybreak to observe the sun rising over the Hudson River. Set on 300 acres of a high plateau known as Pine Orchard, the resort offered dramatic mountain and valley views. Cole placed the Mountain House within a panoramic expanse that included some of the area’s best-known features, including the distinctive mountain peaks of High Peak and Round Top (right), and North and South Lakes.

File: 'Dream of Arcadia' -Thomas Cole [1838].jpg (6MB, 5797x3551px) Image search: [Google]

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"Dream of Arcadia"

>Dream of Arcadia, painted in 1838, is a vision of the Ancient Greek province that had become a byword for pastoral utopia. Utilised as subject by poets, painters, and writers as an idyllic high-water mark for what man should strive for, the concept made the transition between Renaissance mythology and nineteenth-century Romanticism. Yet, unlike utopian ideals, Arcadia is not seen as a state that can be achieved and instead something which has been lost; a world to mourn.

>Painted only two years after his ambitious landscape series 'The Course of Empire', Cole's Dream of Arcadia is a succinct encapsulation of the themes explored therein. Cole's rapid ascent to popular acclaim allowed him to take the Grand Tour of Europe, spending a year visiting Florence, Rome, and Naples. The product of the crumbling debris of empire that he found there inspired his images of a rubble-strewn Arcadia. Dream of Arcadia is thus an imagined reproduction of an imaginary city after a dramatic rise and catastrophic fall. Comparable to the ruins of classical states, Cole's vision articulates the fleeting existence of man and his works, and the continuous resurgence of the natural world.

Thanks for this amazing stuff OP, huge fan of this type of art.

File: 'Home in the Woods' -Thomas Cole [1847].jpg (286KB, 1800x1189px) Image search: [Google]

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>>2753743
Stay tuned, there is more coming. I might do a dump of the other 'Hudson River School' artists sometime in the future too.

"Home in the Woods"

>In Cole’s Home in the Woods, a father returns home to the family cabin in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, bringing with him a fresh catch that will serve as the family’s dinner. The family has cleared the land themselves—the chopped-down trees and sawn logs are prominent in the foreground of the painting. And it is through this detail that Cole reveals his stance on the settlement of unspoiled land in the country’s interior. In his 1836 “Essay on American Scenery,” Cole lamented the “ravages of the axe” that were destroying the wilderness as early as the 1830s.

>In Home in the Woods, the ravages of the axe are prominently represented in the foreground. The artist clearly contrasts the area around the cabin, shorn of trees and littered with the family’s belongings, with the pristine mountains in the background. He seems to warn the viewer that, as more and more people arrive, these unspoiled places will disappear.

yeah cool thread. not particularly familiar with this guy, he's pretty good.

File: 'Prometheus Bound' -Thomas Cole [1847].jpg (3MB, 4409x2889px) Image search: [Google]

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"Prometheus Bound"

Thanks OP, great pics in HR

File: 'Study for The Cross and the World — The Pilgrim of the World on his Journey' -Thomas Cole.jpg (392KB, 2000x1301px) Image search: [Google]

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"Study for The Cross and the World — The Pilgrim of the World on his Journey"

File: 'Sunrise in the Catskills' -Thomas Cole [1826] [Compressed].jpg (6MB, 4000x2857px) Image search: [Google]

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"Sunrise in the Catskills"

File: 'The Angel Appearing to the Shepherds' -Thomas Cole.jpg (1MB, 2250x1225px) Image search: [Google]

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"The Angel Appearing to the Shepherds"

File: 'The Mountain Ford' -Thomas Cole [1846].jpg (744KB, 2000x1411px) Image search: [Google]

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"The Mountain Ford"

File: 'The Oxbow (The Connecticut River Near Northampton' -Thomas Cole [1836].jpg (2MB, 3181x2161px) Image search: [Google]

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"The Oxbow (The Connecticut River Near Northampton"

cool thread op

File: 'The Subsiding of the Waters of the Deluge' -Thomas Cole.jpg (1MB, 4001x2986px) Image search: [Google]

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"The Subsiding of the Waters of the Deluge"

File: 'The Titan's Goblet' -Thomas Cole [1833].jpg (5MB, 1668x2000px) Image search: [Google]

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"The Titan's Goblet"

File: 'View on the Catskill — Early Autumn' -Thomas Cole [c.1836-1837].jpg (628KB, 2000x1225px) Image search: [Google]

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"View on the Catskill — Early Autumn"

>>2753740
>rubble-strewn

maybe I'm just blind but where's the rubble in this painting?
also thanks for the dump OP

Thx OP.
Saved all of them to my artwork-folder.

File: The Course of Empire #5 'Desolation' -Thomas Cole.jpg (7MB, 4361x2768px) Image search: [Google]

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>>2758913

The ruble reference is to Cole's "Course of Empire" series which ends with an 'Arcadian' Civilization being reduced to a pile of rubble (pic related). "Dream of Arcadia" contrast with the "Course of Empire" basically.

>>2759351
ah I see, thanks again

Thanks from me also...very well written descriptions!

>>2753679
I've been through this, there's a two lane highway that runs through the notch and continues exactly as you see the dirt pathway. The pond is still there but the buildings are gone, and a visitor center stands off to the right near where the shack is. This view is looking south.

Wonderful thread btw

File: 'Italian Coast Scene with Ruined Tower' -Thomas Cole [1838] [Compressed].jpg (7MB, 4000x2940px) Image search: [Google]

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>>2759803
Very cool! Any pics?

"'Italian Coast Scene with Ruined Tower"

>I am now engaged in painting a Picture representing a Ruined & Solitary Tower that stands on a craggy promontory whose base is laved by a calm unruffled ocean...I think it will be poetical, there is a stillness, a loneliness about it that may reach the Imagination. -Cole