Landscape with Figures: A Scene from "The Last of the Mohicans"

Thomas Cole was an English-born American painter and the founder of the Hudson River School, the nation’s first major landscape art movement. Born in Bolton-le-Moors, England, Cole immigrated with his family to the United States in 1818. Largely self-taught, he gained recognition during the 1820s for dramatic paintings of the Catskill Mountains and Hudson River Valley. His landscapes combined close observation of nature with Romantic ideas about beauty, spirituality, and the sublime. Cole also used landscape to explore moral and political themes, often expressing concern about industrialization and the loss of wilderness. His best-known allegorical series, The Course of Empire and The Voyage of Life, examine the rise and decline of civilization and the stages of human existence. Through his paintings, teaching, and influence on artists including Asher B. Durand and Frederic Edwin Church, Cole helped establish landscape painting as a powerful expression of American identity.