Thomas Cole was 17 years old when he emigrated to America in 1818, traveling with his parents and two older sisters. In his native Lancashire, Cole had apprenticed with and worked as an engraver. In America, he spent his first five years in Pennsylvania and Ohio, working in his father’s various unsuccessful artisanal businesses, teaching in his older sisters’ schools, and most important, learning how to paint from a traveling artist and a published manual. Cole worked briefly and with minimal success as an itinerant portrait painter in Ohio. His ambition, however, extended further. In 1823, he left his family and went to Philadelphia, supporting himself with part-time jobs while taking advantage of the opportunity for self-improvement at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In late 1824, the Cole family moved to New York City where Thomas soon joined them. When Thomas Cole arrived in New York City in April 1825, he was a 24-year-old self-taught artist at the end of his journeyman years. He placed some small landscape pictures in George Dixey’s carving and gilding shop (all of these paintings were sold but remain unlocated today). Here Cole attracted the patronage of George Bruen, a businessman and art collector who offered to subsidize a late-summer painting and sketching expedition. There was high excitement in New York in 1825 attendant on the completion of the Erie Canal, linking the Hudson River with the Great Lakes, positioning New York to become indeed “the Empire City.” Cole headed north along the Hudson River to the picturesque Hudson Highlands and, beyond, to the Catskill Mountains, where he found himself enthralled and delighted with its dramatic scenery. Armed with sketches, he returned home in September to the studio garret of his family’s rented house on Greenwich Street. Working there, he turned several of his sketches into three oil compositions that he placed for sale in William A. Colman’s antiquarian bookshop and gallery space. And that is where the eminent artist John Trumbull found himself transfixed by these wild landscapes. The circumstances were fortuitous. New York’s small coterie of artists and patrons needed a hero to prove New York’s worth as the center of a genuine American cultural presence. And there was Thomas Cole, young, untutored, besotted with American scenery, and just the genius for the moment.
William Dunlap’s description of the youth of Thomas Cole offers a romantic muddle of fact and conjecture but remains the source of the iconic story of Cole’s “discovery” by Trumbull, Asher B. Durand, and Dunlap. (Accounts from various sources differ in detail, but not in the essential outline. For Dunlap’s version of Cole’s biography and assessment of the artist, whom he knew, see William Dunlap, History of the Rise and Progress of The Arts of Design in the United States, vol. II [New York: George P. Scott and Company, 1834; reprint ed., New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1969], pp. 350–67). Trumbull immediately purchased one of the pictures, The Falls of the Kaatskill (unlocated), and proudly showed it to his friend, the artist, playwright, and journalist Dunlap, exclaiming (so it is said), “This youth has done what I have all my life attempted in vain.” Durand, at the time New York’s leading engraver, happened in, and together, the three returned to Colman’s store where Durand and Dunlap each purchased their own Cole landscape. Dunlap explains that, needing funds (a chronic problem for him), he promptly sold his painting, for twice what he had paid, to Philip J. Hone, the Mayor of New York. This was Lake with Dead Trees (Catskill), now in the collection of the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio. Since Dunlap couldn’t afford to share the profit with the young painter as he claims to have wished, he compensated by doing “my duty. I published in the journals of the day, and account of the young artist and his pictures; it was no puff, but an honest declaration of my opinion, and I believe it served merit by attracting attention to it.” Taking credit where he believed it due, Dunlap continues, “From that time forward, Mr. Cole received commissions to paint landscapes from all quarters ... [and] was enabled to increase his prices... (Dunlap, p. 360).
