Exhibitions

Celebrated as one of America’s preeminent landscape painters, Thomas Cole (1801–1848) was born in northern England at the start of the Industrial Revolution, immigrated to the United States in his youth, and traveled extensively throughout England and Italy as a young artist. He returned to America to create some of his most ambitious works and inspire a new generation of American painters. This exhibition examines for the first time the artist’s career in relation to his European roots and travels, establishing Cole as a major figure in 19th-century landscape art within a global context. It concludes with an examination of Cole’s extraordinary legacy in the work of the next generation of American landscape painters whom he personally mentored, notably Asher B. Durand and Frederic E. Church. Read more.

Object: Frederic Edwin Church, Clouds Over Olana, August 1872. Oil on off-white paper, 8 x 12 1/8 inches. OL.1976.1