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

Swine flu - a cause for cautious optimism?

In the UK, the swine flu pandemic is turning out to be less threatening than had originally been feared. Last week, there were 11,000 new cases – a reduction of half on the previous week. Back in July, there were predictions that we might be seeing 100,000 new cases every day.

There have been 283 deaths – just one for every four thousand people who catch the illness. The chief medical officer warned against complacency, though, and history would suggest rightly. The great flu pandemic of 1918 first appeared as a relatively mild illness, but then returned as the devastating killer of perhaps 70 million people.

Across the world, more than 7,800 people are known to have died of H1N1 after the figure leapt by 1,000 in a week. Most of the deaths have been in the American continents – more than 5,300.

Mutated strains have killed people in Norway and France, and these have been seen in four other countries, but overall most victims still suffer fairly mild symptoms. (See also my blogs of 30 April, 13 May, 6, 11 July, 24 Oct)

Perils of queueing + debut of a mass murderer

An Australian behavioural economist (!), David Savage has analysed the figures for those who died when the Titanic sank on April 15, 1912, and discovered that American passengers were 8.5% more likely to survive than those from other countries, and British passengers 7% less likely. He seems to put this down to the idea that the British formed orderly queues to get into the lifeboats (which did not have enough space for everyone on board) while the Americans behaved, as one newspaper delicately put it, in a “brasher” way. The study concludes that even the Americans, though, were not beastly to female passengers. Women were, on the whole, allowed to get into the boats first, and there was little difference between the survival prospects for Britons and Americans.

Mr Savage concedes, however, that there might be another explanation for the figures. We know that passengers in first and second class had a much better chance of getting away than those in steerage. Only one child in first and second class died, while two out of three of those in steerage perished. Maybe there were just fewer Americans travelling steerage. Overall, after analysing four disasters, the behavioural economist comes up with the reassuring thought that "the whole concept of mass panic – everyone looking after themselves – doesn't hold that strong."

On this day......85 years ago, the creator of the Russian Revolution, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, died. Although he tried to prevent it, he was succeeded by Josef Stalin, who, through doctrinaire economic policies, purges, reigns of terror and fearsome labour camps, was responsible for the deaths of perhaps 30 million people, making him one of the greatest mass murderers in history.