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Annual Beecher Lecture evokes Cole’s English heritage

By Colin DeVries

CATSKILL — In the majority of biographical texts about Thomas Cole, his life often begins in 1818, after he has already emigrated to the shores of the United States.

On the Web page of “Cedar Grove: The Thomas Cole National Historic Site,” the biography of Thomas Cole begins with the following passage: “Thomas Cole was born in 1801 at Bolton, Lancashire in Northwestern England and emigrated with his family to the United States in 1818.”

It then proceeds to talk about the “American” Thomas Cole that most art enthusiasts have become familiar with. But what about the days of his youth, from his birth in 1801 until his emigration in 1818? What was his childhood like? Was there something during that impressionable time that influenced his artwork later in life?

The mysterious childhood of Cole and his adult ties to England were the subjects of the Saturday afternoon lecture at the Temple Israel, which is adjacent to Thomas Cole’s home, Cedar Grove.

Dr. Timothy Barringer, Paul Mellon Professor at the Yale University Department of the History of Art, was host of “The Englishness of Thomas Cole,” a talk discussing some of the potential influences from his life as an Englishman.

Barringer painted a picture of Cole during his talk, one born into a low to middle-class family of Bolton le Moors (present day Bolton, Lancashire) in the booming Greater Manchester area during the Industrial Revolution. As a young boy he witnessed the “dark clouds of industrial smoke and red of the furnaces” slither into what was once a lush forest and natural landscape.

Perhaps this violent transition to urbanization and industry was emotionally traumatic for Cole as a child and adolescent, in turn imbuing in him a resentment for the devastation of nature and industrialism in general. That argument could be supported in his later life by the statements he made through his artwork, as well as the numerous letters and correspondence protesting the scourge of the railroads in the pristine “wildness” of the Catskill region.

As an adolescent, Cole was an engraver’s apprentice with calico printers and it is during this time, Barringer questions, that Cole may have been introduced to the arts.

Barringer then makes a juxtaposition to that of the great English Romantic landscape painter Joseph Mallord William “J.M.W.” Turner, who was also of a low-middle-class upbringing, and how his work — among others’ — influenced Cole’s.

Upon Cole’s return back to Europe in 1829, after he had become familiar with the beauty of the Catskill “wildness,” his heart was moved by Turner’s 1812 work “Snowstorm: Hannibal and His Army.” It was a work of such a “sublime” nature that he would later try to emulate in his own work.

Barringer used the 1836 Cole painting “The Oxbow” to represent the “sublimity of the wilderness” that Cole admired so much in the Catskill region. The cleared plots on the right side of the painting show the ravaged wilderness that once existed in England, but now has been spoiled. The ominous dark cloud in “The Oxbow” is similar to that in Turner’s “Snowstorm,” in that it represents a godly wrath casting a shadow over a desecrated land.

“The Course of Empire,” the epic series of five paintings that show the birth through the desolation of an empire, may have been an allegorical representation of the British Empire, Barringer claims.

From “The Savage State,” representing Cole’s beloved sublime wilderness to the glorious “Consummation,” and the eventual “Desolation” of the once powerful and rich empire.

Barringer implies that it is a message Cole wants to send to Americans, to not let what happened to the British Empire happen to the United States. Perhaps “The Course of Empire” was Cole’s grandiose fashion of environmental activism to provoke a movement from destruction and industrialism to preservation and conservation.

Be it from the likeness of King George IV and the edifice of Regency Park in “Consummation” to the presence of Stonehenge in “The Pastoral State,” it is clear that the “Englishness of Thomas Cole” cannot be denied.

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