What does Thomas oil painting mean? Is Thomas a style or what?

Thomas oil paintings are the general name of the oil paintings created by the American painter Thomas Cole. Thomas is the name of the painter.

Thomas Cole (1801-1848) was born in Bolton, a small town in the "Greater Manchester District" of England in 1801. In 1818, Cole's family immigrated to the United States.

He became a wandering artist as a teenager, traveling from city to city painting portraits of people. As he walked around, he realized that he preferred painting landscapes to painting portraits. So he began to describe the nature of Ohio, where he lived.

In 1825, he moved to New York with his parents. When his landscapes of the Upper Hudson River Valley appeared in New York newspapers, they attracted the attention of several senior art and cultural figures: they introduced Cole to some of his favorite art lovers in Philadelphia and New York. The wealthy family began to become Cole's patrons.

After that, Cole became a famous landscape painter. He lived along the river until his death. In addition to repeatedly depicting the scenery of the Hudson River, when the season was suitable, he would also travel far away, from state to state, carrying pencils and notebooks to record the nature he saw. During the winter, he stayed at home and constructed his paintings from these sketches and sketches.

He also created some allegorical series of works, thinking about world history and the future of the United States. The most famous are the five works in the "Empire Cause Series": From an uncivilized state, mankind entered In the pastoral era, greed and power created a glorious empire, which eventually led to destruction. On the abandoned ruins, there was no human habitation.

Starting from him, a landscape painting school with the Hudson River Basin as its object was born. Through the depictions of Cole and the painters of the "Hudson River School", nature entered the category of American visual aesthetics.

Cole's paintings are based on nature, which is his valuable feature. Compared with his predecessors, he broke the pattern of using landscape as the background of figure paintings, and used nature as the theme to depict, and , he allowed wild nature, not nature under classical norms, to enter landscape paintings.

Thomas Cole can be said to be the founder of American painting art and a "pioneer of the New World."

Extended information:

General It is believed that Cole was the founder of the "Hudson River School"

The "Hudson School" was the most representative school of landscape painting in the United States in the 19th century. During the golden age, from about 1850 to the 1860s, this faction was not well known. It was not until the 1870s that it emerged. It was the product of the dispute between the old and new generations of artists at that time. The focus of the dispute was which one represented the style of American art at that time.

Americans in the 18th century spent most of their time fighting for survival in the wilderness. In the 19th century, they won this struggle. As a result, a nostalgic and romantic mood for nature emerged, and landscape painting began to become popular in the United States.

A group of landscape painters who used the scenery along the Hudson River as their themes were known as landscape painters. The "Hudson River School" marks the beginning of American art getting rid of European influence and gradually revealing its own character. Therefore, the Hudson River School is also called the American Landscape School.

Baidu Encyclopedia—Thomas Cole

Baidu Encyclopedia—Hudson River School