The Snow Squall

Thomas Cole (1801 – 1848)

Oil on canvas, 1825

An immigrant to America at the age of 17, Thomas Cole’s only art training was in making panels for wallpaper, yet he became the “father” of the first great American art movement – the Hudson River School. These works presented an expansive landscape evoking the grandeur of God via the careful selection of particular perfected landscape elements. A “Renaissance man,” Cole was a poet and philosopher as well as an influential artist. His early death at age 47, while tragic, did serve to inspire the second generation of Hudson River School painters Frederic Church and Asher Durand.