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Thomas Cole (1801-1848), The Voyage of Life: Youth, 1842, American. Oil on canvas. 134.3 x 194.9 cm. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (http://www.nga.gov); the Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund. Image © 2005 Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art.

If, to the English, landscape was a religion, then to the Americans it was their bible. The English celebrated their landscape in Constable’s tidy countryside scenes and in Turner’s stormy seas. In literature, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress became their moral guide through the wilderness of life. It took newcomers to America another century or so to catch up, so awed were they by the vastness of their adopted country. A wilderness heretofore only imagined became nothing less than the voice of the creator. Some set out to discover its limits, others preserved it in essays and novels. Thomas Cole (1801-1848), a transplanted Englishman, painted it. His Voyage . . . [Full Text of this Article]

M. Therese Southgate, MD