Thomas Cole

Revisiting Cole’s View of The Oxbow

April 2018. In 1836, Thomas Cole completed one of his most famous paintings, “View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm —The Oxbow.” That same year, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s groundbreaking transcendentalist essay, “Nature,” was published, and Henry David Thoreau,
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Another Conversation with Thomas Cole

February 2018. “It would seem unnecessary to those who can see and feel, for me to expatiate on the loveliness of verdant fields, the sublimity of lofty mountains, or the varied magnificence of the sky; but that the number of
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In Search of the Sublime with Albert Bierstadt in Colorado

July 2015. The word “sublime” isn’t used much these days, but it would have been 150 years ago. America’s westward expansion, and the Civil War, embedded in the context of global exploration and a rapid expansion of science, were challenging the
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The Art of Ecology: Sketching with Cole and Church

May 2015. Even now, in the second decade of the 21st Century, our view of the relationship between humans and nature, and our identity as a society, is shaped by the artists of the Hudson River School, which was the dominant
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