ALBUQUERQUE, NM (PNAN) – On view through Sunday, February 12, 2023 at the Albuquerque Museum is “Thomas Cole’s Studio: Memory and Inspiration” who was the most famous landscape painter in the United States when he died unexpectedly at the age of 47 in February 1848. This survey explores the creative directions of the painter’s last years, the rich and diverse group of works left in his studio at his passing, and how his example so powerfully affected the evolution of art in America.
Thomas Cole’s death shook the American art world. Poet and journalist William Cullen Bryant wrote that Cole’s death left “a vacuity which amazes and alarms….” It was as if one of the “grandest summits” of the Catskill Mountains had suddenly disappeared. Cole was also the founder of the Hudson River School that established an iconic style of American landscape painting.
In December 1846, Cole set up his studio in a new building of his own design and filled it with works from all phases of his career. After more than a year of using the studio, most of those works including, the five-canvas The Cross and the World, a successor to his famous series paintings, The Course of Empire and The Voyage of Life and Cole’s own grand ambitions for the rest of his career remained unrealized due to his untimely passing.
The exhibition reassembles the paintings that were in Cole’s studio at the time of his death and examines the significance of his late work for art in America. The exhibition contains 26 oil paintings by Cole from the collections of the Thomas Cole National Historic Site and renowned institutions as well as other public and private collections.
Also included in the exhibition are the artist’s graphite drawings and sketches in oil and pen, together with a recreation of his working studio environment that includes Cole’s original easels, paint box, brush, palettes, plaster model casts, geological specimens, and guitar.
Cole’s family maintained the New Studio after his death as a shrine to his memory, allowing visitors to experience it just as it had been and draw inspiration from all that it conveyed about him and his art.
On entering, they were immersed in Cole’s world, the room where he painted with a vista of the Catskill Mountains that inspired him. When the renowned American artist Jasper Cropsey was there in 1850, he wrote in a letter, “it seemed as if Mr. Cole would…be in in a few minutes, for everything remains as when he last left painting…Though the man has departed, yet he has left a spell behind him that is not broken.”
That act of preserving the New Studio proved crucial to maintaining and expanding Cole’s legacy and ensuring his profound influence on art in America. For many years it provided the largest and most comprehensive collection of his work. For the painters who would bring landscape to national prominence in mid-nineteenth-century America, including Asher B. Durand, Frederic Edwin Church, John F. Kensett, and Susie Barstow, Cole’s unbroken “spell” would indeed prove of key generative influence in fulfilling his heritage.
Additionally, this exhibition is presented simultaneously with three other exhibitions featuring contemporary artists that engage the natural world through diverse depictions of the landscape: Kiki Smith: From the Creek, Shi Guorui: Ab/Sense – Pre/Sense, and Nicola López and Paula Wilson: Becoming Land.
For more complete online information by this American giant in the arts see: https://thomascole.org.