Thomas Cole

Thomas Cole (1801–1848) was born at Bolton in Lancashire, emigrated to the United States as a young man, and worked in Steubenville, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and New York before dying at forty-seven. He founded the Hudson River School, the first distinctively American movement in painting, and his pupil Frederic Edwin Church carried it forward. But Cole was never simply a landscape painter. His major works are allegorical sequences — The Course of Empire, The Voyage of Life — in which the American wilderness becomes the setting for arguments about time, providence and the fate of nations. The Voyage of Life in particular is explicitly Christian: four canvases following a soul from childhood to death, guardian angel in attendance throughout. All four of The Voyage of Life are in this collection: Childhood, Youth, Manhood and Old Age.