Monday Morning Museum: Thomas Cole

Self-Portrait, 1836 by Thomas Cole

Thomas Cole – Sunday 1 February 1801 Bolton, Lancashire, England to Friday 11 February 1848 Catskill, New York

English-born American Hudson River School Painter

The Titan’s Goblet, 1833

"The massive, vegetation encrusted goblet around whose rim are found classical ruins, and on whose glassy surface boats sail, has been linked to Norse legend and Greek mythology. Theophilus Stringfellow, Jr. described it as a self-contained, microcosmic human world in the midst of vast nature, while Falconer linked the monumental stem of the goblet to the trunk of the Norse world-tree; he likened the cup to "the ramifying branches . . . which spread out and hold between them an ocean dotted with sails, surrounded by dense forests and plains." Other theories tie the fantastic forms to J. M. W. Turner's "Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus" (National Gallery, London), to Italian architecture and geological formations, or to the golden goblet of the sun-god Helios. The elevation and remove of the cup, rimmed with classical remnants, suggests the disassociation of the present, embodied in the surrounding landscape, from the pinnacle of creation which nourished its culture. Cole serves as intermediary, a role open only to the artist or poet, transcending the strictues of the immediate world to unite past and present." - Metropolitan Museum of Art

Last Monday’s Artist – Frederick Childe Hassam
Next Monday’s Artist – Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino

“Monday Morning Museum” logo created by Adrean Darce Brent