Thomas Cole

Thomas Cole’s early paintings celebrated unspoiled nature in a land ripe with promise, combining acute observation with European conventions of the picturesque and the sublime. An English immigrant, Cole studied in Philadelphia before establishing his career in New York. Trips to New England and the Catskills provided material for landscapes painted later in the studio.

Here, a passing storm reveals a mountaintop bathed in sunlight; a blasted tree, dead from a lightning strike, mediates between heaven and earth and suggests the cycle of life. Human presence is interjected at the top of the waterfall, where a Native American salutes nature’s magnificence.