Picturesque and Sublime: Thomas Cole’s Trans-Atlantic Inheritance

To celebrate the 200th anniversary of Thomas Cole’s arrival from England in 1818, the Thomas Cole Site has partnered with the Yale Center for British Art to present the special exhibition Picturesque and Sublime: Thomas Cole’s Trans-Atlantic Inheritance in Cole’s New Studio. 

Picturesque and Sublime presents masterworks on paper by major British artists, including Turner and Constable, together with significant oil-on-canvas paintings by Thomas Cole to demonstrate Cole’s radical achievement of transforming the well-developed British traditions of landscape representations into a new bold formulation, the American Sublime.

Landscape art in the early 19th century was guided by two rival concepts: the picturesque, which emphasized touristic pleasures and visual delight, and the sublime, an aesthetic category rooted in notions of fear and danger. British artists including J.M.W. Turner and John Constable raised landscape painting to new heights and their work reached global audiences through the circulation of engravings. Thomas Cole, born in England, emigrated to the United States in 1818, and first absorbed the picturesque and sublime through print media.

This exhibition is designed to complement the major Thomas Cole show organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery, London.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.     

Installation View, Picturesque and Sublime: Thomas Cole’s Trans-Atlantic Inheritance, Thomas Cole National Historic Site, Catskill, NY Image © Peter Aaron/OTTO 

Whether or not you go, the exhibition catalog, Picturesque and Sublime: Thomas Cole's Trans-Atlantic Inheritance,  providesd important insights into Cole’s formulation of a profound new category in art—the American sublime.  Cole transformed British and continental European traditions to create a distinctive American form of landscape painting. The authors here explore the role of prints as agents of artistic transmission and look closely at how Cole’s own creative process was driven by works on paper such as drawings, notebooks, letters, and manuscripts. Also considered is the importance of the parallel works of William Guy Wall, best known for his pioneering Hudson River Portfolio. Beautifully illustrated with works on paper ranging from watercolors to etchings, mezzotints, aquatints, engravings, and lithographs, as well as notable paintings.

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