Picturesque and Sublime: Thomas Cole's Trans-Atlantic Inheritance

Picturesque and Sublime: Thomas Cole's Trans-Atlantic Inheritance

Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester, Jennifer Raab • Yale University Press

ISBN-10: 0300233531 · ISBN-13: 978‑0300233537 · 2018

Canonical book record

Completeness 50

Cover quality: good

2manybooks editorial

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.

Book metadata

Contributors

Community tags

Inferred themes

Machine-inferred from catalog text. Not verified subjects.

Community signals

Have: 15 · Like: 6 · Rating: 4.3 / 5 (4)