Why Thomas Cole was forgotten
The Daily Mail
Feb. 9, 2009

CATSKILL - Thomas Cole, who is now a celebrated painter, has not always been so loved. For over a century after his death, Cole’s works were largely stowed away and forgotten.

Historian John Stilgoe, who has written several books and essays discussing the changing rural, suburban and urban landscapes in the United States, gave a lecture Sunday explaining why Cole’s works fell out of favor. The lecture was given at Temple Israel, which is built on a plot of land that between 1833 and 1839 was the site of the earliest documented rental of Cole’s Cedar Grove studio and seasonal residence, and hosted by Cedar Grove: The Thomas Cole National Historic Site.

The short answer Stilgoe gave to the question was that Cole died prematurely at 47, on Feb. 11, 1848. Cole also had no publisher to continue promoting his artwork.

Stilgoe supplied a longer answer that touched on visual interpretation of color and discriptors, localism and the discomfort Americans felt remembering the Ante-bellum Era after the Civil War.

“When we look at a Cole painting, it is not only a period painting, it exists now in our time. So when we think about why Cole was forgotten, it is remotely possible that there were things in those paintings that in subsequent decades after his death, began to disturb people,” he said.

Stilgoe accompanied his lecture with slides not of Cole’s body of work, but rather of images of the Federal Express logo, a Newport Red cigarette advertisement and pages from works by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. Stilgoe borrowed the comments and attitudes of his students at Harvard University, where he teaches visual and environmental studies, to present counter-arguements to his own.

Stilgoe began his lecture by explaining how people are trained to see shapes and colors but not what images can be found in their absence. He asked his audience to look for the white arrow present between the “E” and “X” in the logo for Federal Express. He said that as children grow up and are encouraged to study the sciences and mathematics, they lose their ability to notice a more abstract picture. People must recognize what artists call “negative spaces,” he said, to get an understanding of a whole picture.

To understand literature written in the early and mid-19th century, he said, a reader must understand that authors during that time would not have used Webster’s dictionary - a reference book found commonly in classrooms and homes today - but a dictionary compiled by Joseph Emerson Worcester. Words and their meanings fell in and out of use, Stilgoe explained, disappearing from literature in the late 19th century and reappearing in comic books in the 20th century.

Stilgoe showed an advertisement for Newport Red cigarettes in which a woman had around her neck a horse collar, complete with two hames, which allow the collar to be loosened or tightened depending on the size of the horse, and to be attached to different types of harnesses.

“But if you wanted to write a critique of this ad,” Stilgoe said, “you would have to have some of the words. You would have to know to start with what that is.”

He equated the problem of describing the advertisement without knowing the word hame with looking at a Cole painting without knowing the colors or context in which it was painted.

“You have to understand the colors of the countryside,” Stilgoe said.

Today, students are taught that there are seven colors. During Cole’s life, Americans more widely subscribed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s portrayal of the six colors, with yellow being the one true color. He thought of colors as an interaction of light and dark, which when combined, appear as varying shades of grey. Goethe depicted his colors in a symmetric color wheel or in a triangle, with red, yellow and blue as the points.

In the painting commonly known as “The Oxbow,” which was completed in 1836, the shape of Connecticut River might resemble an oxbow, Stilgoe said. But it could also be seen as a noose. Cole saw the a noose-like danger forming around the nation’s capitol during the speculation that lead to the financial panic of 1837.

Cole died before the Civil War, which Stilgoe described as a “great cultural crisis,” began. The world that Cole painted was destroyed almost immediately after his death, Stilgoe said.

“What happened was people looked at all of Cole’s paintings, not just the landscapes, but the allegories, too, raised issues that had to be put away for a long time,” he said.

He described the pain felt by Americans after the war like the way someone might feel looking at family photographs after a divorce or the death of a child.

Southern plantations were broken apart or sold to Northern abolitionists. Stilgoe said wealthy businessmen along the Mississippi River, who were responsible for a great deal of international finance, resented the war. Those connected to prominent abolitionists were slaughtered by troops, he said.

After the war, veterans became a marginalized class of people well into the 20th century and had trouble finding steady work, Stilgoe explained. Many were hired as farm hands or were unable to work. Many got into fights and became alcoholics, he said.

Cole’s work focused on specific scenes, whereas later artists painted a general genre, Stilgoe said. As time passed, and people began to see themselves in a more globally connected world. Traveling began to mean to visit London, for example, but not exploring the parts of America that lies between the two coasts, he said.

He asked the audience how many of them knew that Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. had worked to cure puerperal fever, a deadly disease of women giving birth. Few did.

Stilgoe said that Holmes’ work helped one subset of the population, women, just as Cole’s paintings spoke to people who lived around the the chosen hills and rivers in the paintings.

Stilgoe first became interested in Cole’s work after reading that the artist liked to walk around and experience the outdoors.

He discovered Catskill during graduate school when he was looking for interesting things between Santa Fe, N.M. and Boston, Mass., and came across the Rip Van Winkle Bridge.

Stilgoe was one of the earliest people in recent time to recognize the importance of Cole’s work, according to David Barnes, whom invited Stilgoe to present his findings and is member of the Cedar Grove board of governors. He added that Cole scholarship has grown during the last ten years.

Stilgoe ended his lecture by talking about how the popularity of cameras and photography changed how people saw the countryside. At first, wealthy photographers and publishers did not print photographs showing poverty, he said. Soon pictures were framed to exclude telephone poles and wires. Such evidence of technology were either ignored because they were unnatural or because they perverted the view.

The evolution of the postcard, he said, came about because people did not have the words to describe the landscapes, cities or sights that they could see.

“Images are still more important than words,” he said.