(ambient music) - We are sitting here in Thomas Cole's home and it is also the home of Mariah Cole and about 11 other people.

They all lived here in Catskill, New York where we have a view of the Catskill Mountains here off to my left, and the property used to go all the way to the Hudson River off here to my right.

(mellow music) - Thomas Cole's life is very interesting because he moved to the United States after having seen the Industrial Revolution in England and he had his concerns with him.

- Well, he comes here as a teenager, an older teenager, and he's leaving a very polluted industrial environment that he's growing up in an England that's filled with soot and dirt.

- And in 1825, when he went to New York for the first time and he saw the Catskills, he was so touched and was so moved by the beauty of this land that he created these paintings and really urged people to consider: What is being lost with by industry?

What is now being transformed through industry?

(ambient music) - Thomas Cole was a trailblazer.

I mean, he paved the way for dozens of artists who followed him.

History tells us that he created a few paintings, and he brought them to New York City, and they sold right away.

And it doesn't take long for other artists to notice that that's going on.

And there are some very talented artists around, and so this spawns interest, this is an incentive to create landscapes.

So Cole gets this American art form started.

- I think looking at Thomas Cole's collection is important, and it's important because this is one person in this whole landscape, and how they saw their environment, and also how they wanted other people to see it, right?

There's this romanticization of it; there's the religious element of the Second Great Awakening and God's gift, in particular to Americans and to New Yorkers here in this area; the wilderness and manhood, that's all part of it.

- Over the course of the paintings that we have of his, you can see an evolution.

That evolution is, it's there in his work.

That's why I was thinking that if he had lived longer, we really don't know where that would have gone.

He never got to a point where I feel he matured as an artist, and maybe that's also part of what was going on with his expressions that somehow seemed a bit naive about man's relationship with divinity.

Maybe time would've changed his thoughts about those things.

(gentle music) Cole inspired others.

And in the work of the artists that followed him, like Frederic Church, like Asher B. Durand, like Jasper Cropsey, Frederick Kensett, we don't see the same kind of pious storyline, this romantic story that has to do with human tragedy or human experience.

But we see the space, we see the environment.

A sunset, maybe, that we felt, or that we've been in that environment of that storm.

That's not a cold storm.

A cold storm is about the hand of God sweeping across the sky.

(ambient music) - Thomas Cole was an immigrant to this country.

He came from England when he was a teenager, and so he brings an immigrant experience, but he also brings the experience of one person.

And he was a white man from Europe.

I think what we're trying to also show here is that there are a lot of other people that were right here on the ground doing important work that have a different perspective, and that it was only through looking at the entire household, and all of the people working here, and Thomas Cole's sisters.

And when you look at the entire diverse population of who was working here, you get a picture of the diverse population that was creating America at that time.

(ambient music) - [Announcer] Sponsored in part by Albany Medical Health Center and by Robert and Doris Fischer Malesardi.

(ambient music)