Thomas Cole

[osprey_archer]

Have 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.

Comments

[athenais.livejournal.com]

When Americans talk about the history of their country, they go straight from the signing of the Declaration of Independence to the Civil War like nothing at all happened in between. Ask them to name one of the presidents after Adams: cricket chirp. Ask them to name American artists: more crickets. It is weird.

P.S. Rubens was the one with glasses (well, the one who always wore them, the others did occasionally, I suppose) who did really nice nature paintings and still lives with fruit, etc. I mean, I'm not excited by them, but they are pretty damn good for someone who didn't want to be a painter like everyone else in his family.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Well, let's face it, the antebellum years are a little embarrassing. Slavery, the Trial of Tears, the Mexican-American War...clearly better just to skip right to the Civil War!

Then people tend to skip from the Civil War to the Roaring Twenties or the Great Depression (or, if they're being really cursory, to WWII), because the Spanish-American War and the aftermath of WWI are also kind of awkward.

[isiscolo.livejournal.com]

I was going to immediately protest and name Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran (my Western US bias, let me show you it). But I just checked Wikipedia (shut up) and they are both a bit post-Cole, AND considered part of the Hudson River School (the movement Cole founded), AND AND AND also naturalized American citizens born elsewhere. Sigh.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Wikipedia is very useful! I often use it as a starting point to see if so-and-so will fit into a project well. Sometimes I later find out that the Wikipedia facts are wrong or (more often) incomplete, but it's still useful for a basic gloss on the subject.

Anyway - antebellum America actually had a number of interesting artists and writers; there just never seemed to be enough assuage the American feeling of cultural inferiority, and maybe it was impossible for there to be enough, because what Americans wanted was not just artists but an artistic history, and of course the only thing that can give you that is time.