Picturesque and Sublime

Book excerpt: Thomas Cole (1801-1848) is widely acknowledged as the founder of American landscape painting. Born in England, Cole emigrated in 1818 to the United States, where he transformed British and continental European traditions to create a distinctive American idiom. He embraced the picturesque, which emphasized touristic pleasures, and the sublime, an aesthetic category rooted in notions of fear and danger. Including striking paintings and a broad range of works on paper, from watercolors to etchings, mezzotints, aquatints, engravings, and lithographs, this book explores the trans-Atlantic context for Cole's oeuvre. These works chart a history of landscape aesthetics and demonstrate the essential role of prints as agents of artistic transmission. The authors offer new interpretations of work by Cole and the British artists who influenced him, including J.M.W. Turner and John Constable, revealing Cole's debt to artistic traditions as he formulated a profound new category in art. the American sublime.