BEST AMERICAN ART by Alexandra Jopp

A View near Tivoli (Morning), 1832. Although he was not the first American landscape painter of quality, because Thomas Doughty and Thomas Birch, among others, were already at work, Thomas Cole enjoys the preeminent reputation as the best known, most widely admired, early 19th century painter of nature. Founder of the Hudson River School, Cole embodied in his life's  work a significant duality, revealing on the one hand a Platonic sense of nature as morally, religiously, and philosophically uplifting, and on the other a remarkable ability to capture the natural fact. This duality, which historian Barbara Novak identifies as "the real and ideal" was approaching resolution when Cole died. "Landscape with dead trees" is clearly a real painting, a very early effort, and one of three pictures which brought immediate success to Cole when first exhibited by a New York frame-maker in 1825. It was the product of the artist's first exploration up the Hudson Ri...