Thomas Cole: painter of storms

The nineteenth century American artist Thomas Cole of the Hudson Valley School is not much known in this country, but now he has an exhibition devoted to his work at the National Gallery in London. 

Cole was born in Bolton, Lancashire in 1801, emigrating to the US in 1818. From 1825, he lived in the lovely Catskill Mountains of New York State until shortly before his death in 1848. The Catskills has plenty of wild weather, and that led me to feature his work in my book Storm: Nature and Culture (Reaktion).

In 1835, he painted a tornado in the Catskills in a pretty straightforward, naturalistic way (picture 3) but he was also interested in storms as a metaphor, so in the final picture of his series, The Course of Empire (picture 2) a glowering vortex of storm clouds gather over a city as it is destroyed. Cole noted: ‘A savage enemy has entered the city. A fierce tempest is raging.’ In a related (free) exhibition at the National Gallery, the contemporary American artist Ed Ruscha offers his own take on the same theme.

Similarly in Cole's Voyage of Life series from 1842, Childhood and Youth have calm skies, while Manhood is tempestuous (picture 1)

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Storm-Nature-Culture-John-Withington/dp/1780236611

https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/thomas-cole-eden-to-empire

Painting the frozen North

At the moment, I'm writing a book about storms, so I was lured into London's National Gallery to see an exhibition of paintings by the 19th century Norwegian artist, Peder Balke, of his country's wild and windy Arctic regions.

In the spring of 1832, Balke sailed along the coast of Norway, right up to the North Cape, and drew on what he saw there for inspiration and subject matter for the rest of his life. He was not particularly successful, and soon turned away from painting to property development and left-wing politics.

Still the exhibition, which is free, is an interesting portrayal of places seldom seen in paintings. Personally, I felt his moonlight scenes worked better than his daylight works, though he had a disconcerting habit of putting a rowing boat in an identical position in a number of his compositions. The exhibition also has some atmospheric depictions of mountains looming out of mist.

Many of the pictures have never been exhibited before in the UK, and the exhibition runs until April 12.

*This article on heatwaves quotes from my Disastrous History of the World.  http://roadtoinsure.com/heat-record-setting-heat-waves-history/