Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings and Nineteenth-Century Landscape Painting

Tim Barringer, Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art, Yale University

This inaugural biennial lecture, named in honor of the Center’s founder, Paul Mellon (Yale College, Class of 1929), reconsiders the work of Thomas Cole, long revered as the founder of American landscape painting. Through a consideration of Cole’s origins in northern England during the Industrial Revolution, and his formative return trip to England and to Italy in 1829–32, the lecture will offer a reading of Cole’s key works as part of a transatlantic artistic interculture, adding a new dimension to our appreciation of a familiar figure. Professor Barringer and Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, Alice Pratt Brown Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, are curators of a major loan exhibition, Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings, to be mounted in 2018 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery London. Works on loan from the Center’s collection will form a key element of the exhibition.