From Bolton-le-Moor

Thomas Cole

As a young artist [Thomas] Cole roamed the Hudson River valley and the region around the Catskill and Adirondack mountains, making sketches of the shrubs, trees, rocks, and waterfalls that he later incorporated into his own imaginative compositions to depict the look and feel of America's wilderness.Because he was the first American artist to picture the wilderness with the passion of a poet and to capture its spaciousness and grandeur with technical skill, Cole exerted a strong influence on the new direction landscape painting was to take. Cole and his followers, who comprised a group that later became known as the Hudson River School, created a variety of styles to record, with pride and fidelity to nature, the unique, romantic qualities of the American scene.Nora PanzerAmerican Landscapes: 19th-Century Selections(Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, n.d.)