Cole was the first wonder of American painting to prove him self entirely on native ground. Earlier prodigies like Benjamin West, had had to do it in Europe, and it mattered greatly to John Singleton Copley's clients in Boston that Sir Joshua Reynolds praised Copley's early work. But neither Europe nor England paid attention to Cole. From across the Atlantic he would have seemed a mere provincial, fluctuating between derivative Claudia pastorals and apocalyptic religious allegory in the manner of John (''Pandemonium'') Martin.
 

Cole's paintings are often suffused with doubt and nostalgia, a sense that the America of early settlement and cooperative virtue was passing away, to be replaced by a harder, more competitive, get-and-spend society whose class pyramid seemed shaky. His work keeps circling around the image of pastoral America as an imperiled Arcadia, beset by storms that pass but, by their presence, connote disturbances in the social fabric. His most famous image of this kind is View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, After a Thunderstorm, 1836 -- ''The Oxbow,'' for short. On the right, the serene bend in the river, the golden Claudian light; on the left, a storm blotting out the distance, and blasted trees out of Salvator Rosa; in the foreground, the artist's painting kit, including a parasol -- the frail equipment of a witness to immense forces.

Thomas Cole was simply one of those New Yorkers who hated New York City, who needed it for art-world business but fled to the Catskills for artistic nourishment. Cole's strategy was altogether fresh in the 1820s, when he began to reinvent the landscapes of Claude Lorraine and Constable so that they could bear the load of homily. Almost always there is a precarious and craggy near distance, beyond which are shadowed distances, and beyond that infinity. The paintings are big and radiant - particularly at a distance, and as handsomely hung as they are in the Brooklyn's newly restored West Wing. Close up, especially in the early work, there's a crabbed stiffness, a picky insistence on every little leaf that's rather wearing. And although this self-taught painter never did get good at people or animals, he insisted on inserting tiny little noble savages, fishermen, sheep and goats everywhere as message bearers. When Cole, the young British immigrant, began showing his paintings in New York in 1825, Andrew Jackson was just beginning the political ascent that would lead to his presidential victory over patrician John Quincy Adams. The elitist vs. populist lines has shifted only slightly since. The country and the city were in the throes of rampant industrialization. Fields were being plowed, buffalo butchered, the Indians driven onto reservations. By the time Cole died in 1848, the contradictions, particularly slavery, had begun to split the country and lead it toward civil war.

The Brooklyn continues the tale of what happened after the Civil War with a mesmerizing display of 10 newly researched and restored paintings from its collections that display the range of stars and lesser lights - from William Merritt Chase, impressionist and exotic in "The Moorish Warrior" (1876-78), to William Keith, slavishly transporting the Thomas Cole style west in "Mount Hood, Oregon" (1876). When Cole started painting landscapes in 1825 he often included dead trees - in part because Cole was looking back from an age in which towns were replacing farmland. Sometimes, as in "Home in the Woods" (1847), he'll permit himself to display his distaste for white-trash civilization through something as naturalistic as a squalid fisherman' s log cabin. Usually, though, he buries his nostalgia for a more aristocratic and Arcadian past in allegory. The mother of all allegories is "The Course of Empire" (1834-1836), the great set piece comprised of eight paintings, five of which still exist. The central panel, "The Consummation of Empire," refers to a classical city as primed for disaster as, in Cole's view, Jacksonian New York: all columned buildings and teeming crowds - eating, drinking, conspicuously consuming. To the right it is flanked by what led up to it: "The Savage State," have romantic wilderness, and "The Pastoral or Arcadian State," of landscape tamed but not disturbed. To the left "Destruction" presents the city's downfall; "Desolation" is picturesque ruins. Clearly, Cole had a soft spot for such desolation, and sought it out in ruined castles and churches all over Europe. Ruins too could be message bearers: that European civilization was exhausted and only-slightly-sullied America was ready to take over.

Kenneth James LaBudde, an American Studies scholar writing in 1958, noted that in River in the Catskills much of the sheltering softness of nature has disappeared [by comparison with View on the Catskill-Early Autumn]. The scene has been flattened by the removal of the foreground trees and most of the trees across the creek. Buildings not seen before have now come into view and they and the denuded fields look like an American farm instead of an English park. In a somewhat similar vein, Barbara Novak, in an article published in 1976 and reprinted without alteration four years later in her book Nature and Culture, made what was to become an obligatory comparison between View on the Catskill-Early Autumn and River in the Catskills and decided it demonstrated "some progress [in Cole's oeuvre] from the ideal to a more pragmatic encounter with the real, from mythic time to human time."

Voyage of Life were tremendous, colorful, detailed, accessible canvases. Physically, they were very large, nearly 4 1/2 feet high and 6 feet wide. The four paintings are called Childhood, Youth, Manhood and Old Age. They were all done in one year, 1842. Cole (1801-48) was Irish. He came to America when he was just 18, only lived 47 years, but he left a prodigious output and single-handedly founded the Hudson River School, the first great movement in American landscape painting. "Thine eyes shall see the light of distant skies; yet Cole! Thy heart shall bear to Europe's strand, a living image of our own bright land, Such as upon thy glorious canvas lies!" wrote American poet William Cullen Bryant.

 
Cole never had to struggle in a garret; his contemporaries adored him. Critic Bert D. Yaeger has written feelingly about Cole in his 1996 book, The Hudson River School. Similarly, Susan Danly, writing in 1988 in the introduction to The Railroad in American Art (a volume she co-edited with Leo Marx), argued that there was little in River in the Catskills to suggest that Cole "regretted the transformation from wilderness to pastoral. He recognized nature's constant flux and saw that man's constructions could be harmoniously accommodated within the pictorial landscape.... In such a [settled landscape] the railroad posed no threat."
The Voyage of Life is essentially four huge landscapes, with only a few tiny figures in them, dwarfed by titanic mountains and infinite skies. In Childhood, a baby emerges from a dark, mysterious cave in a golden carved boat with a full crystal hourglass on its prow, into a world of ravishingly beautiful, dewy flowers and trees, dawn-lit. A guardian angel stands in the boat behind him, protectively. The infant flings up his little arms in a charming gesture of ecstasy, thrilled at the newness and beauty of this world.

Works Cited
Bryant, William Cullen The Poems of William Cullen Bryant Reprint Services Corp; ISBN: 0781221277; Reprint edition (November 1989)
Cole, Thomas, The Collected Essays and Prose Sketches, ed. Marshall Tymn (St. Paul: John Colet Press, 1980).
Danly, Susan introduction to The Railroad in American Art 1988 (as in n. 14), 1
Maddox, Kenneth, "Thomas Cole and the Railroad: Gentle Maledictions, " Archives of American Art, journal 26, no. 1 (1986): 2-10
Novak, Barbara, Nature and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). Parry, Ellwood C., III The Art of Thomas Cole (Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 1988).
Yaeger, Bert 1996 The Hudson River School Cornell University Press; ISBN: 0801434890; September 1996