Focus on The Voyage of Life and analyze the Background.
Thomas Cole is regarded as the founder of the Hudson River School, an American art movement that flourished in the mid-19th century and was concerned with the realistic and detailed portrayal of nature but with a strong influence from Romanticism. This group of American landscape painters worked between about 1825 and 1870 and shared a sense of national pride as well as an interest in celebrating the unique natural beauty found in the United States. The wild, untamed nature found in America was viewed as its special character; Europe had ancient ruins, while America had the uncharted wilderness. As Cole's friend William Cullen Bryant sermonized in verse, so Cole sermonized in paint. Both men saw nature as God's work and as a refuge from the ugly materialism of cities. Cole clearly intended The Voyage of Life to be a didactic, moralizing series of paintings using the landscape as an allegory for religious faith.Unlike Cole's first major series, The Course of Empire, which focused on the stages of civilization as a whole, The Voyage of Life series is a more personal, Christian allegory that interprets visually the journey of man through four stages of life: infancy, youth, manhood and old age. The originals were done on commission and completed in 1840, but a disagreement arose with the owner about a public exhibition. In 1841–42, when Cole was in Rome, he did a second set of the series which on his return to America in 1842 was successfully exhibited in several major cities and received further attention upon Cole's unexpected death in 1848. The first set is at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York, and the second set is at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
National Gallery of Art Thomas Cole God Washington, D.C. Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute William Cullen Bryant commission United States The Course of Empire Utica, New York death allegory Hudson River School Christian Romanticism American art