Thomas Cole

Thomas Cole arrived in America from Lancashire as a teenager and effectively invented the country’s first school of landscape painting. Within a few years of his 1825 trip up the Hudson, other painters were following the same route looking for the same effects.

His interest was never purely scenic. The Course of Empire, a five canvas sequence running from wilderness to ruin, and The Voyage of Life argue a case about civilisation and decline. He worried in print about American forests being cleared, which makes him an early conservationist voice as well as a painter.

The straight landscapes hold up better than the allegories for most modern viewers. Storm light over the Catskills, blasted trees in the foreground, a valley opening beyond. Church was his only formal pupil and took the approach somewhere Cole probably never imagined.