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Thomas Cole

Landscape (Landscape with Tree Trunks)
Now On View

Maker

Thomas Cole (American, 1801-1848)

Title

Landscape (Landscape with Tree Trunks)
Landscape with Tree Trunks

Year

1828

Medium

Materials/Techniques

Techniques

Materials

oil paint

Supports

Dimensions

66.4 x 81.9 cm (26 1/8 x 32 1/4 inches)

Signature / Inscription / Marks

Signature: Signed and dated LC:T. Cole 1828 Boston

Credit / Object Number

Credit

Walter H. Kimball Fund

Object Number

30.063

Type

Publications

  • Journal

Manual / Issue 15: Green

RISD Museum’s Manual 15 Celebrates Green

New life is always shown to us through mokingpu, the color green-the light green stems of rabbitbrush, one of the few colors seen the winter; the tender green shoots of new corn that emerge in the spring against the backdrop of the dry brown earth. Green offers hope. Green represents life.

-Susan Sekaquaptewa

A welcome splash of color after a long winter, the RISD Museum’s fifteenth issue of Manual is awash in shades of green, celebrating the color's myriad associations with nature and growth, environmentalism and sustainable practices, newness and hope (as well as poison and currency) and delving into the histories of specific pigments and processes. Manual 15 opens with an introductory essay by Hopi grower Susan Sekaquaptewa, who details the soft hues of the flora of Northern Arizona. “You appreciate plants more when you develop a relationship with them,” she explains.

This issue of Manual is supported in part by a grant from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, through an appropriation by the Rhode Island General Assembly and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional generous support is provided by the RISD Museum Associates and Sotheby’s.

Articles

K-12 Virtual Visit

Exhibition History

18th and 19th-Century American Galleries
Jun 19, 2015
Charles Pendleton House
Jan 02, 2015
Making It In America
Oct 11, 2013 – Feb 09, 2014

Label copy

Thomas Cole’s early paintings celebrated unspoiled nature in a land ripe with promise, combining acute observation with European conventions of the picturesque and the sublime. An English immigrant, Cole studied in Philadelphia before establishing his career in New York. Trips to New England and the Catskills provided material for landscapes painted later in the studio.

Here, a passing storm reveals a mountaintop bathed in sunlight; a blasted tree, dead from a lightning strike, mediates between heaven and earth and suggests the cycle of life. Human presence is interjected at the top of the waterfall, where a Native American salutes nature’s magnificence.

American Art from the Permanent Collection
May 01, 2010 – Aug 31, 2014
An American Idyll
19th-Century Paintings and Decorative Arts
Apr 06, 2007 – Jan 06, 2008

Image use

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Public Domain This object is in the Public Domain and available under a CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication

Tombstone

Thomas Cole (American, 1801-1848)
Landscape (Landscape with Tree Trunks); Landscape with Tree Trunks, 1828
Oil on canvas
66.4 x 81.9 cm (26 1/8 x 32 1/4 inches)
Walter H. Kimball Fund 30.063

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