UC Berkeley

The Anglo-American artist Thomas Cole is now firmly established in the canon for his landscape paintings and allegories but it has not been adequately understood how deeply he was invested in architecture. This dissertation seeks to remedy that oversight by studying archival evidence that shows his sophistication as a painter, designer, and critic of buildings and his participation in intellectual currents of the time through the built environment. What discussion there has been of Cole’s little known work in architecture in the past has treated the episodes under discussion as anomalous or peripheral to his core work. On the contrary, “Something of an Architect: Thomas Cole and the Country House Ideal” demonstrates the extent to which many of his best known paintings were the product of practical architectural endeavors with which he was involved in the same years, and that he approached the built environment pictorially.

The three chapters study three distinct but related elements of his response to architecture. Chapter One focuses on Cole’s writings about public architecture, including the Washington Monument, the Ohio Statehouse, and an essay he called “Letter to the Publick on the Subject of Architecture.” These documents, most of them never before published, demonstrate a preoccupation with architecture as a force for harmony, unity, and permanence in a fractious society that sorely needed all three. Chapter Two studies Cole’s little known “house portraits”: paintings of the country houses of three patrons. These seemingly topographical views have been largely disregarded as regrettable concessions to financial necessity that have little to tell viewers about the concerns of an artist better known for grand allegories like The Course of Empire. However, considering them in relation to new evidence of his architectural thought shows these enigmatic images to be participants in a vibrant contemporary discourse about country houses as ways of civilizing and inscribing the wilderness with history and about the place of aristocracy in a republic. Chapter Three studies Cole’s extensive plans for an Italianate villa of his own that would put his study of architecture in general and the country house in particular into practice. While most of these designs were unexecuted due to his financial circumstances, they testify to his participation in this moment of national literal and metaphorical investment in country life. This context urges a rethinking of much of the oeuvre of “the father of the Hudson River School” and of the ideologies with which country life and its representations were fraught in the antebellum era.