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Thomas Cole
Mar. 21st, 2013 08:08 amHave moved on from Charles Willson Peale to Thomas Cole, the man who single-handedly created the genre of American landscape painting. America spent most of the antebellum period trying desperately to prove to both itself and Europe that it was totally capable of producing its own art and literature, so it didn’t need European art anymore, SO THERE.
Mostly this didn’t work out. Well, when was the last time you read an antebellum American anything? Whereas in the 1840s, England was producing Jane Eyre!
(Well, you may protest, but Poe! But Poe didn’t count as great literature. Also, it is too bad Poe never met Cole, because the two of them could clearly have had a wonderful time talking Gothicism together.)
Thomas Cole, however, rose from this cultural morass to do America proud. In his paintings, tiny figures traversed vast landscape, dwarfed by the mountains and lashed, at times, by ill weather. A real bona fide American artist, working on paintings of American landscapes, which he managed to imbue with the kind of gothic drama that Europeans needed castles to create! America was so proud.
America: Britain! Lookit lookit lookit! I HAVE A REAL ARTIST NOW.
Britain: Hey, that is pretty nice. For an upstart nation with no culture.
(Britain had a cottage industry of travel books about how shockingly ill-mannered antebellum America was. Americans read these books avidly, gnashing their teeth and shaking their fists at the sky at the vast unfairness of the British, because really, most Americans had long ago stopped eating things off their knives.)
Britain: …but isn’t Thomas Cole British?
America: SHUT UP HE’S A NATURALIZED AMERICAN CITIZEN LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU.
It’s going to be a pretty exciting paper.
Mostly this didn’t work out. Well, when was the last time you read an antebellum American anything? Whereas in the 1840s, England was producing Jane Eyre!
(Well, you may protest, but Poe! But Poe didn’t count as great literature. Also, it is too bad Poe never met Cole, because the two of them could clearly have had a wonderful time talking Gothicism together.)
Thomas Cole, however, rose from this cultural morass to do America proud. In his paintings, tiny figures traversed vast landscape, dwarfed by the mountains and lashed, at times, by ill weather. A real bona fide American artist, working on paintings of American landscapes, which he managed to imbue with the kind of gothic drama that Europeans needed castles to create! America was so proud.
America: Britain! Lookit lookit lookit! I HAVE A REAL ARTIST NOW.
Britain: Hey, that is pretty nice. For an upstart nation with no culture.
(Britain had a cottage industry of travel books about how shockingly ill-mannered antebellum America was. Americans read these books avidly, gnashing their teeth and shaking their fists at the sky at the vast unfairness of the British, because really, most Americans had long ago stopped eating things off their knives.)
Britain: …but isn’t Thomas Cole British?
America: SHUT UP HE’S A NATURALIZED AMERICAN CITIZEN LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU.
It’s going to be a pretty exciting paper.
