Thomas Cole and the Decorative Arts

Thomas Cole, A View of the Mountain Pass Called the Notch of the White Mountains, 1839. Oil on canvas, 40 c/af” μ 61 E/af”.

(courtesy of the national gallery of art / andrew w. mellon fund)

At Cedar Grove, the Catskill, New York, home of the painter Thomas Cole, his studio brims with stories. Brushes, palettes, and a mammoth studio easel recall the way America’s first great landscape painter went about his artistic business. He painted fast, standing up, first under-painting in burnt sienna, then applying successive layers of color onto the stretched canvas propped on the easel. Cole (1801–1848) captured both wild and pastoral landscape—especially the Hudson River Valley and Catskill Mountains. He also painted visionary works couched in scenery, such as his famed The Voyage of Life, a four-panel allegory in which figures representing childhood, youth, manhood, and old age float down the river of life.

Cole inspired a group of talented artists considered to be America’s first native art movement, the Hudson River school. He’s celebrated as a self-made, self-taught artist who never painted a picture before emigrating from England in 1818 and discovering the glorious American wilderness. An enduring mystery surrounds his artistry. He had devoted himself to painting for only a couple of years before his extraordinary landscapes burst upon the New York art scene in 1825. Just how an apparently untrained artist came to create work of such power so quickly is baffling: His personal history simply doesn’t add up. While researching his studio’s contents, I was astonished to stumble upon a massive clue to the mystery, hidden in plain sight: a well-worn folding chair.

Asher B. Durand, Portrait of Thomas Cole, 1837. Oil on canvas, 30⅝” × 25⅝”.

(Courtesy of the Berkshire Museum. Gift of Zenas Crane.)

This humble piece of seating furniture looks like a modern director’s chair. The seat and back, made of a needlepoint-like textile, have an odd stylized design of white flat-topped pyramids and scarlet birds of paradise on a golden ground. It’s an incongruously decorative chair to find in a workspace—and an unusually personal one.

This chair obviously knew Cole well. The seat sags poignantly like a pair of shoes left behind by a dead man. The back, still taut, reveals that Cole sat upright—or leaned forward—to see close at hand the many poems, letters, and essays he wrote, or the foreground details he painted so carefully. This was a studio chair, far too heavy and ungainly to be lugged along on sketching trips.

While its uses recall Cole’s day-to-day labors, the chair’s quirky appearance sheds light on his seemingly precocious artistic development. In the process, Cole’s studio chair also raises fascinating questions about why his artistry’s true backstory has remained hidden for so long.

Today, Cole’s large originals are valued in the millions, and The Voyage of Life can be bought online as either framed giclée reproductions or a four-piece set of refrigerator magnets. Despite such exploitive commercialism, confronting an actual Cole painting remains a visceral experience. Ground falls away below the viewer’s gaze, collapsing into a heart-plunging abyss, or thrusts upward in primeval chunks and slabs. Sunlight drops like a veil over water and woods. Cole channels the spirit of American wilderness.

The paintings—and their creator’s apparent lack of training—astonished the public and artists alike. Renowned portraitist and historical painter John Trumbull (1756–1843) exclaimed, “You surprise me, at your age, to paint like this. You have already done what I, with all my years and experience, am yet unable to do.” Cole’s peers explained his untrained artistry as, in the words of poet and New York Evening Post editor William Cullen Bryant, “great genius.”

Belief in genius was in the air. This was the age of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Sir Walter Scott—an age of Romantic writers, musicians, philosophers...