Perhaps the first time I felt like an adult, to the extent that I’ve ever earned that honorific, was freshman year in college art history class. After four years of high school and torture chamber courses in chemistry and math, all with the goal of gaining admission to an Ivy League college, I was sitting in the dark, albeit not in the Ivy League, looking at beautiful slides of works of art. "I can’t believe I’m getting paid for this,” I said to myself. Or words to that effect. Meaning getting college credit for something that seemed so enjoyable, almost recreational.
That course was an introduction to the history of art; Art 101 as it was referred to on my inaugural report card astride a “B” for the semester. It wasn’t until sophomore or even junior year that I qualified to take American Art. But when I did it felt like a breath of fresh air after all those saints and madonnas and Mona Lisas. In fact, in some of those masterpieces — for example, Thomas Cole’s The Oxbow of the view from Mount Holyoke after a thunderstorm, or Asher B. Durand’s escapist Catskill scenes or Albert Bierstadt’s Edenic vision of the American West — you could envision yourself embedded in the landscape in a way you never could onto the static backdrops of Italian Renaissance paintings.
It’s a tribute to the Hudson Valley that hiking or even driving through it still provokes the appreciation that the British born Thomas Cole experienced the first time he saw it in 1825 after a patron financed a trip up the Hudson River to the Catskills. Cole and his younger friend, Frederic Church, who became perhaps the most famous of the Hudson River School coterie, occupied homes on opposite sides of the river. I don’t know if Church could actually wave to his mentor from the terrace of Olana, his Moorish hilltop palace three miles away, but it’s not inconceivable.
With huge tableaux such as Heart of the Andres and The Icebergs, Church was the Steven Spielberg of his age. Lines snaked around the block on Manhattan’s 10th street when Heart of the Andes was shown for the first time. In the same way that Church outshone Cole so would his home. The mentor’s house was gracious but it wasn’t the crazy castle that Olana was.
Yet over the last decade or so, under the leadership of Betsy Jacks, The Thomas Cole Historic Site’s executive director, the painter is getting the due befitting the Hudson River School’s founding father and staple of American art history courses. His most important works — not just the Oxbow but also the allegorical Course of Empire and the slightly freaky Titan’s Goblet — were prominently featured in that sophomore year American Art class.
What may be the final piece of the Thomas Cole Historic Site puzzle fell into place in recent weeks with the opening of a new visitor’s center. You’re familiar with new car smell. Well, I’m here to tell you there’s also such a thing as spanking new building smell. The facility somehow manages to be modest, modern and majestic at the same time and like any such self-respecting public structure these days boasts its environmental bonafides. In fact, their green practices are posted in the rest rooms where you might expect to find a sign admonishing employees to wash their hands.
These include everything from compostable coffee filters to maintaining meadows rather than lawns to reduce mowing. In fact, my wife and I were inspired by the landscaping as we made our way from the visitor’s center to the reconstructed studio, now an exhibition space, where Cole painted for the final fourteen months of his life. Rising from a thicket of what looked to the untrained eye like weeds was a sign that stated, “Let it Grow,” and the web address “thomascole.org/Biodiversity. It reminded us of a lot of our own property. Rather than worrying that whatever those plants — undoubtedly native in the case of the Thomas Cole House — are taking over our place why not just plant a sign and call it a day.
One of the new visitor center’s achievements is that its completion helps unify the campus. It transforms the main house, where the Cole family lived, and a bunch of out buildings — is it my imagination or was there previously a repurposed outhouse and if so what happened to it — gardens and orchards into a pastoral piazza once the grass surrounding the tables and chairs on the visitor center patio grows in.
On trips abroad I’m always felt lucky when I discover small museums, in provincial towns or cities, filled with great art. After the crowds and drama surrounding major museums, the intimacy, often combined with lightly populated galleries, is a wholly different and welcome experience. Though there were a surprising number of visitors at the Thomas Cole Historic Site on an overcast summer day. It also doesn’t hurt if there’s an impressive gift shop and spotless rest rooms and the visitor center has both.
The historic site doesn’t overlook the Hudson River. In a sense it does it one better. From the wide porch of the main house it gazes west with an unobstructed view of the Catskills. It doesn’t take an art historian, or even an art-smitten college sophomore, to understand where Thomas Cole drew daily inspiration.
Ralph Gardner, Jr. is a journalist who divides his time between New York City and Columbia County. More of his work can be found be found on Substack.
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