The nineteenth-century produced a group of American painters who, to an exceptional degree, revealed that a dream or a vision need not be shaped in fantasy but may exist in ordinary aspects of the world around us. That is, a New World idiom that could effectively confront the isolation of the human spirit in a region beyond time and beyond space….
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The Titan’s Goblet, 1833
Thomas Cole (American, 1801–1848)
Oil on canvas; 19 3/8 by 16 1/8 in. (49.2 x 41 cm)
Gift of Samuel P. Avery, Jr., 1904 (04.29.2)
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Cole often painted fanciful landscapes, but this work may be his most enigmatic. Its main feature evolved from sketches the artist made in Italy in 1832 of fantastical fountains, bearded with foliage, which were evidently inspired by actual ones he saw at sites in Florence, Rome, and Tivoli, possibly informed further by the basinlike appearance of volcanic lakes near Rome such as Nemi and Albano. —click image for source…
This can be shown in Thomas Cole’s In the Catskills. Cole was the leader of the mid-nineteenth century school of American romantic landscape painters known as the Hudson River school. A dominant theme is the preoccupation with the mystery and grandeur of nature, often framed in reference with themes merging on those of fantastic invention in uncharted territory that America represented. In one of Cole’s exceptional pictures, The Titan’s Goblet (1833), he even anticipated the surrealist device of combining detailed realism with unrealistic reversals of scale. Here, the goblet holds ships borne upon a vast lake.
—Thomas Cole (American, b. England, 1801-1848). River in the Catskills, 1843. Oil on canvas. 69.85 x 102.55 cm (27 1/2 x 40 3/8 in.). Gift of Martha C. Karolik for the M. and M. Karolik Collection of American Paintings, 1815–1865.
© Museum of Fine Arts, Boston—
But in The Catskills, Cole is less novel and more subtle, revealing the world of dream within the world we can more easily relate to and unblemished by magic or sleight of hand. It is both lyrical and competent, but on closer examination there is more to discover: there wrinkled between the trees and small valleys are human figures isolated from one another in small, intimate, enclosed worlds. It is almost Bosch like. A man chases horses through a field and another rows a boat across the glassy water. There is also a hunter approaching a fence.
—Thomas Cole, View on the Catskill, Early Autumn, 1837—WIKI
Ordinary enough in themselves,each little world-within-a-world grows magical because each is magically revealed. Thy are at once close to us and infinitely removed. Intimate yet inaccessible. It is this gift of crystallizing inner experience that elevates an artist from the ranks of mere craftsmanship or technical expertise only. There is a chemistry, an alchemy of some sort that rises and permeates the whole whether it be unwilled or even unsuspected by the painter.
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