America: Painting a Nation

Thomas Cole

Date: 1826

Credit Line: Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection

Object number: 1993.2

Text Entries: (modified anniversary publication entry) The English-born painter Thomas Cole, a key figure of the Hudson River School, recognized the epic potential of the American landscape. On his arrival in Philadelphia at the age of seventeen, he had already been apprenticed to an engraver and soon turned his interest to painting. He later moved to New York City and, inspired by the magnificent vistas along the Hudson River, began to define landscape as a spiritual subject that could transcend its function as a mere topographical record. In this way, Cole contributed to the romantic transformation of landscape painting from documentary and picturesque views into a discourse on the human experience set against the enduring forces of nature, elevating the once modest genre of landscape painting to an expression of the heroic sublime. In Landscape with Figures: A Scene from "The Last of the Mohicans" the human figures are dwarfed by an awe-inspiring vista of towering mountains and an expansive sky. Cole portrays the denouement of James Fenimore Cooper's newly published, popular novel The Last of the Mohicans (1826). The painting visualizes the novel's climactic scene in which the hero frontiersman Hawkeye aims his shotgun at Magua, the native villain, who tries to flee down a cliff. Cora Munro, the heroine of the novel, after being kidnapped and brutalized by Magua, lies dying at Hawkeye's feet. The grandeur of Cole's autumnal wilderness of scarlet leaves and wild rushing mountain streams overwhelms the narrative, however, reminding the viewer that there are greater forces in the universe than human conflict and desire.