Thomas Cole
American, 1801-1848
An Italian Autumn, ca. 1844-1847
Oil on canvas
Museum purchase with funds from the James C. and Virginia W. Meade Collections Endowment, the Meade Acquisition Fund, and the Beaux Arts Society Fund for Acquisitions, 2019
Visual Description
This is a painting, roughly three and a half feet tall and five feet wide, of an autumnal countryside landscape featuring crumbling ruins and rocky hills covered in grass and green shrubs. The sky is a pale purple-blue color that transitions to a pale pink near the horizon and is filled with fluffy white clouds.
On the right side of the landscape are the ruins of a stone tower, its upper left portion destroyed and open to the elements. The tower is covered in dark green vegetation. To the left of the ruined tower and set on a hill further back in the landscape is a smaller dilapidated stone structure, also covered in vegetation. A partially destroyed stone bridge extends out from the tower’s base. A rickety wooden bridge is built on top of the stone bridge and extends over a stream that cuts through the center of the landscape. A woman and young child walk hand in hand across the bridge.
On the right side of the stream, a man stands calf-deep in the water fishing. On the left side of the stream, a goat wanders along the sandy shore and a cow bends down in the water to take a drink. On the left side of the landscape, a man holding a wooden shepherd’s staff kneels before a simple shrine of the Madonna and Child built into a large tree’s trunk. Several goats frolic and graze around the tree.
Extended Label Text
Crumbling ruins sprout out of a large hilly landscape while a fisherman casts his line in a gently moving brook. A rickety bridge spans the river in the middle distance with a mother and child crossing. In the foreground, a religious pilgrim approaches an outdoor shrine of the Madonna and Child. Using a strategy present in his best landscapes of the late 1820s onward, Thomas Cole depicts a theatrical scene in the foreground while an exquisite sun-soaked landscape shines luminously in the background. Founder of the Hudson River School, Cole is widely regarded as the first significant American landscape painter.
