Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Thomas Cole
American, British; 19th-century
Atlanta, GA: High Museum of Art
37%
The Tempest. c1826. Oil on panel
This is a small and somewhat dashed-off piece, so I feel a little bad taking it to task. But then again, it's a finished oil painting, and it contains so much of what's reproachable about Cole, so here goes. It's not just that it's treacly (although its treacliness surpasses even that of most other canvases by Cole, who was an irremediable sentimentalist). It's that all the syrup in the story it's telling oozes through the way it's structured as a painting, softening it and gumming everything up. That Ruisdael tree, for instance, arcing left in empathy with the dying girl below — it splits the picture's allegiances and allows the gut of open air behind the tableau to consume all the piece's would-be energy (jagged branches and billowing trees). Nor is this imprecision made up for by Cole's handling, which is sort of precise wherever he's trying to make a point (tree; tableau), but equivocal everywhere else. There's a similar equivocation — a tendency towards patchiness and blended strokes — in the work of later American landscapists like Blakelock and Tanner, but they had the good sense not to distract themselves with narrative, and to really physicalize their canvases. (TFS, 2025)