Brief Biography-Thomas Cole spent his youth in England until his family immigrated to America in 1818. He worked for his father in the wallpaper business doing patterns and engravings in Pittsburgh. Cole was primarily self-taught in painting but took some instruction from a travelling portraitist. He engaged in portraiture for a brief period before becoming interested in landscapes. The works of Thomas Birch and Thomas Doughty inspired him to dedicate his time to landscape painting.
He moved to New York and created works from his journeys up the Hudson River. Those works brought him considerable success in New York. He eventually became the founder member of the Hudson River School and a founding member of the National Academy of Design.
He went on trips to Europe, where he absorbed some inspiration from the works of the Old Masters. When he returned to America, he settled in Catskill, New York. The young artist Frederick Edwin Church became his student and strongly influenced the landscapist Asher Brown Durand.
Thomas Cole was also a poet and writer when not painting, travelling, or lecturing. Sadly, he died suddenly from pneumonia, a young man of only forty-seven.