The literary paintings of Thomas Cole: Image and text

When the American artist Thomas Cole (b. 1801, Lancashire, England) died suddenly in 1848, his colleagues and patrons organized a Memorial Exhibition, framed in such a manner that the public would remember the artist for his literary paintings as much as for his scenes of the American wilderness. Of the ninety-three artworks, listed in the catalogue (Exhibition of the Paintings of the Late Thomas Cole, at the Gallery of the American Art-Union, New York, 1848), nearly one-half carried a literary title or written passage. This study examines a group of literary landscape paintings by Thomas Cole. By investigating the vital interactions between the visual and verbal signs, the study recovers the primacy of the literary arts in this major but understudied group of literary landscape paintings. It demonstrates that even as the artist adapted a literary text, he transformed it into a striking program of iconography that probed crucial issues in American culture in the early decades of the nineteenth century.;Each chapter takes up an individual or a set of paintings, viewed through the lens of a series of literary texts. In the pictures from The Last of the Mohicans, 1826--27, based on The Last of the Mohicans; A Narrative of 1757 by James Fenimore Cooper, Cole brought together American art, literature and identity politics to critique the culture he celebrated. The artist turned to a modern interpretation of Protestant theology in the paired paintings, the Garden of Eden and Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, 1828, derived from Paradise Lost. Challenging Milton's sorrowful but peaceful conclusion, the painter looked to poetic descriptions of Chaos and Hell to portray a harrowing Fall. In the unconventional painting of Manfred, 1833, influenced by Lord Byron's eponymous poem, the artist confronted the difficult subjects of incest and the role of the artist as a genius and wily magician. In the monumental image of Prometheus Bound, Cole recovered Aeschylus' ancient myth of the same name. As the artist linked the creative spirit of Prometheus to the Romantic age, he asserted his own cultural authority over the classical past.;With the production of the literary landscapes. Cole achieved his highest aspirations to reach beyond a literal transcription of nature to a landscape of poetry. Inspired by classical and modern literary genres, and European and American authors, the painter inserted himself into a tradition of poesis and established a modern form of historical landscape painting on American terms. Both as individual works of art and as a group, the literary landscapes offer fresh perspectives on how Cole used the literary arts for different aesthetic, expressive, and conceptual purposes.