Thomas Cole’s path was individual, uncomfortable, and anything but inevitable. With his paintings and prose, he advocated for the idea of a national art grounded in the land, and saw before most others the threats that populism and demagoguery posed to the endurance of the wild nature that inspired him. His embodiment of an art that spoke truth to power is more timely than ever. 

—William Coleman, Wyeth Study Center Director, Brandywine Museum of Art/Farnsworth Art Museum 

Amid rapid transformations in the young nation of the United States, Thomas Cole’s paintings helped codify a sense of national identity. Even as they romanticized the American landscape, Cole’s works also reflected his keen observation of nature and the relationship he built with his local landscape near Catskill, New York. In 2026, as we reflect on the history of this nation, may we be reminded that our own relationship with the land is one of ongoing responsibility. 

—Caroline Gillaspie, Assistant Curator, The American Wing, The Metropolitan Museum of Art  

As we mark America’s 250th anniversary and reflect on the struggles and successes that have shaped the nation, it is fitting to consider the evolving American landscape—from wilderness to field to factory. In the early republic, no artist captured the era’s fraught relationship with progress more vividly than Thomas Cole, a tension that remains deeply present in America’s public consciousness and civic dialogue today. 

—Graham C. Boettcher, PH.D., The R. Hugh Daniel Director & CEO, Birmingham Museum of Art 

Thomas Cole’s deep reverence for nature endures as a cultural touchpoint in American history. His artwork and writings continue to spark vibrant conversations about our relationship with the landscape. As we look to commemorate America 250, Cole’s spirit compels us to reflect upon the natural world, where, as the artist once proclaimed in a letter to his patron Daniel Wadsworth, “It is here, in such sublime scenes that man sees his own nothingness; and the soul feels unutterably.” 

—Erin Monroe, Krieble Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture, The Wadsworth 

Cole’s vision continues to unfold. With each generation, we appreciate his vision anew: his art remains fresh, his horizons endless.

—Mark Mitchell, Holcombe T. Green Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture, Yale University Art Gallery

Thomas Cole’s impact on the American landscape can still be found today, his influence was wide reaching and truly defined what landscape painting was and what it could be for generations of artists. 

—Ann Cannon, Curator of American Art, Fenimore Art Museum 

In the mid-to-late 1820s and the 1830s Thomas Cole almost single-handedly brought landscape painting in America to new levels of critical admiration and popular acclaim. Cole’s influence on other artists was profound, and his generative role in helping establish America’s first great national school of painting—the Hudson River School—cannot be overestimated. The works Cole himself created, including American and European scenes and subjects drawn from history, literature and his own fertile imaginative were not only creations of great beauty, but also objects with complex meanings and associations that still fascinate and resonate with us today two hundred years later. 

—Franklin Kelly, Deputy Director and Chief Curator, National Gallery of Art (retired)

Cole’s story, a brilliant one, is that of a man of obscure origins who brought to his adopted country a vivid and profound connection to the natural landscape and a poetic vision unparalleled in the United States at the time. These qualities inspired a will to create works of nature-centered art that have spoken to Americans across two and a half centuries about the past, present and future of nations, and the power and fragility of human ideals.

—Teresa A. Carbone, Independent Art Historian and Curator

Cole’s idea of nature extended beyond outward scenery. In his famous religious allegory, “The Voyage of Life,” he used landscape elements together with diurnal and seasonal cycles as a kind of Greek Chorus, mirroring the shifting psychological states of a Christian pilgrim progressing through the four traditional stages of life. For Cole, America’s nature was both a physical place and a metaphysical state of mind.

—Paul D. Schweizer, Director Emeritus, Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute 

When Thomas Cole took on his most important student, Frederic Edwin Church, who spent the years 1844 to 1846 in his Catskill studio, Cole imbued in the young artist a reverence for the direct observation of nature and taught him his practice of sketching and painting on-site studies.  This relationship ensured that the first national school of landscape art in America, first launched by Cole, would flourish as Church’s renown as a landscape painter reached new heights by mid-century and beyond. 

—Elizabeth Kornhauser, Ph.D., Curator Emerita, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Senior Curator and Chair, Frederic Church Bicentennial Committee, The Olana Partnership  

Thomas Cole’s arrival in New York City two centuries ago aligned his own longing to paint landscape with the latent yearning for it to blossom there…Those welcomed his ensuing impulse to venture more ambitious scenes of national import, enlarging a reputation around which a succeeding generation insured landscape’s preeminence for a half-century. 

—Kevin Avery, Senior Research Scholar, The Metropolitan Museum of Art