It takes a split second these days to create an image, and how many millions are recorded daily on mobile phones, possibly never to be looked at again? You can see it all happening in the palatial surroundings of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, definitely one of those tick-off destinations on many travellers' bucket lists, where those in search of instant pictorial satisfaction throng the imposing statue-lined staircase for a selfie or pout for a photo in the café under the spectacular cupola. But we're not in Vienna for a quick fix, we're at the KHM to admire something more enduring in the shape of art produced almost 500 years ago by Rembrandt and his pupil Samuel van Hoogstraten that was intended to mislead your eyes into seeing the real in the unreal. Artistic deception is the story at the centre of Rembrandt--Hoogstraten: Colour and Illusion , one of the most engrossing and best-staged exhibitions we've seen this year. And, somewhat surprisingly, a show wi...
Some of the landscapes in Thomas Cole: Eden to Empire at the National Gallery in London are ravishing, but they carry more of a political subtext than you might expect, with messages that are still relevant today.
Cole, the great American landscape artist of the early 19th century, was concerned by increasing urbanisation and industrialisation in a United States making rapid advances into its as yet largely unsettled interior. His paintings contain warnings about the ecological costs of unchecked development.
Perhaps we should know more about Cole, because he was actually born in Bolton in 1801, spent his early years working in textile mills in Lancashire and emigrated to the US with his family while still in his teens. But his paintings are largely in American collections, and that's where the 58 works on show at the National mostly come from.
Cole was a self-taught painter, and he enjoyed early artistic success with bold views of the Catskill Mountains in New York state in the mid-1820s. View of the Round-Top, on loan from Boston, has perhaps something of Caspar David Friedrich about it, though without a wanderer standing above the clouds. The Garden of Eden, from the Met in New York, presents nature's bounty amid a rather more idealised landscape.
At the end of the decade, Cole travelled to Europe, studying Turner, Constable and Claude Lorrain in London but not meeting with commercial success. So he moved on to Italy, where he painted a number of glorious views, including this Aqueduct Near Rome. The ruins are symbols of the fallen Roman Empire.
A View of Florence from Cleveland contains similar luminous skies.
On his return to New York in 1832, Cole began a cycle of works that is seen as his greatest achievement. The Course of Empire is the title of five canvases depicting the rise and fall of civilisation, and together they form an impressive ensemble. They're normally on show in the New-York Historical Society, the city's oldest museum.
The paintings depict the same geographical location, though from different viewpoints, over what appears to be the course of a day from sunrise to sunset. The first, The Savage State, contains images of hunters with bows and an aboriginal encampment under a stormy sky. The second picture, The Pastoral State, appears to show Cole's ideal, a bucolic, Arcadian serenity with a temple-like structure in the middle distance.
In The Consummation of Empire, a colonnaded marble city is witness to a triumphal procession, but in the next image, Destruction, it is collapsing amid rape and pillage under a dark cloud borrowed from Turner. As the day draws to a close in Desolation, nature has reclaimed the land.
In The Oxbow, Cole got his message across in a single painting of the Connecticut River Valley. Here the contrast is between the wilderness the painter so admired on the left (he's shown himself in the foreground, working on the view), and the encroachment of civilisation, in the shape of farming on the right. Sheep and haystacks dot the fields, and scars from logging can be seen on the mountain in the background.
By 1843, Cole was concerned by a new technological threat -- the railroad. In River in the Catskills, the first known depiction in American art of a train cuts across the canvas.
Cole died at the age of 47, but had he lived longer, he would probably have been horrified by the pace of development. Three decades on from The Oxbow, American Pre-Raphaelite Thomas Charles Farrer painted the same locality. The wilderness is gone, the land has been tamed.
This is an interesting show, though Cole's work inspires gentle appreciation, rather than shock and awe. For a bit more bang for considerably less buck, in fact no buck at all, you'll want to drop in to the companion display in the National Gallery's Room 1, for Ed Ruscha's contemporary take on Cole.
Ed Ruscha: Course of Empire brings together 10 works by the artist depicting industrial sites in Los Angeles, painted first in 1992, and then again just over a decade later. The transformation is telling: 1992's Blue Collar Tool & Die, albeit under looming cloud, still seems to be a traditional American workplace.
By 2004, The Old Tool & Die Building is in Asian hands, even if its use is unclear. Does this sound a bit Trumpian?
Similarly, Tech-Chem is now Fat Boy, while the trade school is boarded up. But the biggest change? What was once a phone booth is now, of course, the Site of a Former Telephone Booth.
These are large, stunning canvases, with the 1990s paintings each hung above their 2000s counterparts. Brought together from a range of different collections, they have an absolute wow factor and they deserve to be seen and appreciated at full scale.
Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: The Pastoral or Arcadian State, about 1834, Courtesy of the New-York Historical Society. © Collection of The New-York Historical Society, New York/Digital image created by Oppenheimer Editions
Thomas Cole, View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm -- The Oxbow, 1836, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. (c) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, photo by Juan Trujillo
Thomas Charles Farrer, View of Northampton from the Dome of the Hospital, 1865. Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts. © Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts
Ed Ruscha, Blue Collar Tool & Die, 1992, Whitney Museum of American Art. © Ed Ruscha/photography Paul Ruscha
Ed Ruscha, The Old Tool & Die Building, 2004, Whitney Museum of American Art. © Ed Ruscha/photography Paul Ruscha
Cole, the great American landscape artist of the early 19th century, was concerned by increasing urbanisation and industrialisation in a United States making rapid advances into its as yet largely unsettled interior. His paintings contain warnings about the ecological costs of unchecked development.
Perhaps we should know more about Cole, because he was actually born in Bolton in 1801, spent his early years working in textile mills in Lancashire and emigrated to the US with his family while still in his teens. But his paintings are largely in American collections, and that's where the 58 works on show at the National mostly come from.
Cole was a self-taught painter, and he enjoyed early artistic success with bold views of the Catskill Mountains in New York state in the mid-1820s. View of the Round-Top, on loan from Boston, has perhaps something of Caspar David Friedrich about it, though without a wanderer standing above the clouds. The Garden of Eden, from the Met in New York, presents nature's bounty amid a rather more idealised landscape.
At the end of the decade, Cole travelled to Europe, studying Turner, Constable and Claude Lorrain in London but not meeting with commercial success. So he moved on to Italy, where he painted a number of glorious views, including this Aqueduct Near Rome. The ruins are symbols of the fallen Roman Empire.
On his return to New York in 1832, Cole began a cycle of works that is seen as his greatest achievement. The Course of Empire is the title of five canvases depicting the rise and fall of civilisation, and together they form an impressive ensemble. They're normally on show in the New-York Historical Society, the city's oldest museum.
The paintings depict the same geographical location, though from different viewpoints, over what appears to be the course of a day from sunrise to sunset. The first, The Savage State, contains images of hunters with bows and an aboriginal encampment under a stormy sky. The second picture, The Pastoral State, appears to show Cole's ideal, a bucolic, Arcadian serenity with a temple-like structure in the middle distance.
In The Oxbow, Cole got his message across in a single painting of the Connecticut River Valley. Here the contrast is between the wilderness the painter so admired on the left (he's shown himself in the foreground, working on the view), and the encroachment of civilisation, in the shape of farming on the right. Sheep and haystacks dot the fields, and scars from logging can be seen on the mountain in the background.
Cole died at the age of 47, but had he lived longer, he would probably have been horrified by the pace of development. Three decades on from The Oxbow, American Pre-Raphaelite Thomas Charles Farrer painted the same locality. The wilderness is gone, the land has been tamed.
Ed Ruscha: Course of Empire brings together 10 works by the artist depicting industrial sites in Los Angeles, painted first in 1992, and then again just over a decade later. The transformation is telling: 1992's Blue Collar Tool & Die, albeit under looming cloud, still seems to be a traditional American workplace.
These are large, stunning canvases, with the 1990s paintings each hung above their 2000s counterparts. Brought together from a range of different collections, they have an absolute wow factor and they deserve to be seen and appreciated at full scale.
Practicalities
Thomas Cole: Eden to Empire and Ed Ruscha: Course of Empire are both on at the National Gallery until October 7. The exhibitions are open daily from 1000 to 1800, and on Fridays until 2100. Full-price tickets for Cole cost £10 Monday to Friday and £12 at weekends, but are £2 cheaper booked online here. There's no charge for Ruscha. The National Gallery is on the north side of Trafalgar Square, just a couple of minutes from Charing Cross or Leicester Square stations on the rail and Underground networks.Images
Thomas Cole, Aqueduct Near Rome, 1832, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis. © Kemper Art Museum, Washington University St. LouisThomas Cole, The Course of Empire: The Pastoral or Arcadian State, about 1834, Courtesy of the New-York Historical Society. © Collection of The New-York Historical Society, New York/Digital image created by Oppenheimer Editions
Thomas Cole, View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm -- The Oxbow, 1836, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. (c) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, photo by Juan Trujillo
Thomas Charles Farrer, View of Northampton from the Dome of the Hospital, 1865. Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts. © Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts
Ed Ruscha, Blue Collar Tool & Die, 1992, Whitney Museum of American Art. © Ed Ruscha/photography Paul Ruscha
Ed Ruscha, The Old Tool & Die Building, 2004, Whitney Museum of American Art. © Ed Ruscha/photography Paul Ruscha
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