THOMAS COLE 1801-1848
Italian Landscape, 1839
Oil on canvas, 35 X 5311 (88.90 x t34.62 cm.)
Signed, lower center
Museum purchase, 945-0-102

Thomas Cole has long been known as the founder of the Hudson River School. He has also come to be recognized as a romantic landscape painter of comparable importance to American culture as John Constable is to England's or Caspar David Friedrich to Germany's. Born in England in 1801, Cole emigrated with his parents to Pennsylvania in 1818. Already trained as an engraver, the aspiring painter set out to capture the still largely unexplored American wilderness. In a now familiar story, when Cole first exhibited his landscapes in New York City in 1825, they enthralled two of America's most prominent artists, John Trumbull and William Dunlap, both of whom immediately recognized the freshness and vitality of the young artist's vision.
From essentially topographical records of America's mountains, rivers, and forests, Cole moved quickly to incorporate incidents from James Fenimore Cooper's newly-published novels in his landscapes, thereby elevating those landscapes to the stature of history painting. Indeed, Cole seemed happiest when he could give full rein to his poetic imagination, as in such monumental series as The Course of Empire (1836, New-York Historical Society), initially conceived by the artist during his first trip to Europe, from 1829 to 1832. The Course of Empire traces, through five views of the same landscape, the rise and fall of a fictional civilization, from its inception in savagery, through an arcadian stage, culminating in urban magnificence. The glories of civilization are followed by war and destruction and then melancholy desolation. This pessimistic view of history, in which humans are seemingly doomed to repeat their errors, was consciously countered at the time by the promise of progress, seen by Cole, among others, as uniquely embodied in the American wilderness, a place of inexhaustible resources, a place where there were no ruins.
Europe, and particularly Italy, abounded in ruins, those "speaking ruins" that, in the words of the American poet Edward Pinckney, "have been but hallow'd by the hand of time." After returning from Europe in 1832, Cole continued to paint imaginary Italian landscapes alongside his views of American scenery. These Italian compositions, as Cole called them, inevitably depict the remains of ancient temples, aqueducts, and towers. The Butler Institute's painting, one of the largest of these Italian views, was commissioned for five hundred dollars in 1839 by Frederick J. Platt of Newburgh, New York, and was exhibited in the Cole, Memorial Exhibition in 1848 under the title of The Improvisator.
As in Cole's other views of Italy, Italian Landscape shows an expansive summer landscape peopled by goatherds and travelers, often with an Italian town and mountains in the distance. Here there is also a prominent craggy outcropping on the left and a river on the right. Sometimes dancers appear in these ideal scenes, as in Dream of Arcadia (1838, The Denver Art Museum); often, as here, there are mothers with small children, a fisherman, or a troubadour with a lute, who may be singing to a roadside Madonna (An Italian Twilight, 1841, Toledo Museum of Art), or, as in this instance, to an assembly of picnickers. Italian Landscape contains eighteen such figures, including the artist himself, seen sketching the scene from the shelter of a grove of trees in the extreme lower left of the painting.
It is no accident that this Claudian reverie deliberately recalls Cole's Pastoral State in the Course of Empire series. But this is a post-desolation landscape, a time after the fall of Rome when humans have returned to a "chaste and harmonious" serenity that, in the artist's terms, is mankind's proper goal. "What is Fame, if the mightiest empires leave so little mark behind?" Instead, we are counseled by Cole to seek the solace of music, the art of harmony:

Sit thou enthroned where the Poet's mountain Above the thunder lifts its silent peak, And roll thy songs down like a gathering fountain, That all may drink and find the rest they seek. Sing! there shall silence grow in earth and lower heaven, A silence of deep awe and wondering; For listening gladly, bend the angels even, To hear a mortal like an angel Sing.

Such landscapes have several purposes in Cole's large view of history. In them we are reminded of the transience of human endeavor, which is deliberately contrasted to the permanence of God's creation in the rocks and mountains that enclose the scene. They also serve as statements of what makes a culture livable, which for the artist was not the bustle of industrialism and commerce, but rather a peaceable coexistence with nature, enlivened by the arts.

BRUCE W. CHAMBERS