Catskill, N.Y. — The Thomas Cole National Historic Site, just over the Hudson in Catskill, N.Y., has long been a favorite destination for art lovers, and for anyone with even the slightest interest in what our part of the world looks like. As Thomas Cole (1801-48) was the founder of the Hudson River School of landscape painting, it’s only a slight stretch for the people who run it to call this “the place where American art was born.”
Now Cedar Grove – for that is the property’s original name – has been entirely transformed by the rebuilding of the structure that Cole and his family called “The New Studio.” This building, originally constructed to Cole’s own designs in 1846, marked the culmination of his efforts to find an adequate Catskill workspace that had begun in the 1820s when he made his first forays up the Hudson Valley from New York City. Over the years Cole had made do with a series of studio spaces in the existing Cedar Grove buildings (and, incidentally, met and married Maria Bartow, niece of his landlord John Thomson). It was in these studios that Cole gradually evolved his painting style – a fusion of late Romanticism with the local topography – that was his legacy.
Ironically though, Cole was never entirely satisfied as a painter of landscape (he sometimes dismissed it as mere “leaf painting”) and aspired to more sophisticated pursuits. In particular, he wanted to be an architect. He had listed himself under that profession in the New York City directory and as well as designing this studio, he was the architect of St Luke’s Church that was built in Catskill in 1839 (though sadly demolished in 2000). He can even be credited with the design of the Statehouse in Columbus, Ohio. He entered the 1838 competition and placed third among the fifty architects who submitted schemes. It was eventually a modification of his design that was adopted, and the building was completed in 1861.
Still, the New Studio is interesting not because of its architecture, but because of the art that was made inside it, if only for a couple of brief years at the end of Cole’s life. After his death it was apparently treated as a sort of shrine to his genius, though eventually it fell into disrepair and in 1973 it was torn down by Cedar Grove’s then owners. The remarkable new recreation sits on the original foundations and has been constructed following Cole’s original designs. In fact the exterior replicates the original structure exactly as Cole knew it, but rather than housing a studio, it accommodates the first museum-quality climate-controlled space for displaying art that has ever existed on the site.
It is altogether fitting then that the first exhibition to be staged here is Thomas Cole: The Artist as Architect. Curated by Annette Blaugrund and Kate Menconeri, it offers fascinating insights into Cole’s thinking. It suggests that Cole’s attitudes regarding natural landscape on the one hand, and man-made structures on the other, were not entirely reconciled. This is unsurprising. Cole was born in the rapidly industrializing north of England in 1801, and lived there until his family immigrated to this country when he was 17 years old. (This was precisely the time when William Blake was writing about England’s “dark Satanic mills.”) So as he witnessed the gradual transformation of the Hudson into an important modern industrial route, he represented it less as it actually appeared and more as a late Romantic might have imagined it.
The key work in the show is actually called The Architect’s Dream, and it has an almost hallucinatory quality to it. In the foreground the architect (which might be Cole himself) reclines among outsize books and drawings atop an enormous classical column. Stretching off into the distance is a sequence of buildings in a whole range of architectural styles, from contemporary neo-Gothic, through various phases of Classical, to an Egyptian pyramid. As Cole’s inscription informs us, this painting was commissioned by Cole’s architect friend Ithiel Town. Somewhat ironically, Town rejected the reluctant leaf-painter’s work because it didn’t include enough landscape. And that, apparently, was the end of their friendship.
Some artists thrive in times of flux, and Thomas Cole appears to have been one of them. His work is still strewn with the appearances of the Romantic era, but his aspirations were more modern. He wanted to give his fellow Americans the opportunity to “know better how to appreciate the treasures of their own country,” and this ambition was at the heart of what his Hudson River School followers took from him. It is genuinely moving to be once again able to stand in the building where Cole brought his artistic efforts to their conclusion.
