After the Deluge

Thomas Cole (1801 - 1848)
The Subsiding of the Waters of the Deluge
1829
oil on canvas
90.80 X 99.99 cm
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Cole rose to prominence in the late 1820s as America's first important landscape painter.

He was born in Bolton, near Manchester, England. At age 17, he emigrated to the United States.

He was the first of the Hudson River School of painters

He excelled in landscape.But religious themes also predominate. He converted to Anglicanism late in life.

This painting is not a recognisable American landscape.But one can only gasp at the imagination which produced such an image of a landscape after a disaster