Drawings

Thomas Cole’s Drawings: Introduction

A twisted tree stump, a river valley covered in tiny written notes, a reclining classical figure and a diagram for five paintings might seem to belong to different artists. Thomas Cole drew all these things because drawing answered different needs. It helped him recognise a particular natural form, remember a distant place, study the human body and organise an ambitious story. His sheets reveal how much work lies between encountering a landscape and presenting it as a finished painting.

Drawing accompanied Cole across America and Europe. Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser’s account of his working methods describes more than two thousand drawings and at least eighteen sketchbooks. Those figures suggest the scale of a sustained practice, rather than a small collection of occasional preparations. His drawings deserve attention both as records of that practice and as images whose choices of line, emphasis and empty space reward looking in their own right. ^[1]

At a Glance

• SubjectsTrees, mountains, rivers, architecture, figures and plans for paintings.
• MaterialsAmong the surviving examples are graphite, ink, wash, and black and white chalk.
• Early exampleFrom Nature, signed and dated 20 May 1823, Albany Institute of History & Art.
• Major landscape recordThe annotated Mount Holyoke panorama at the Detroit Institute of Arts.
• Later preparationStudy for The Mountain Ford, 1846, National Gallery of Art, Washington.
• Important distinctionAn oil sketch is a painting, even when it performs a preparatory task similar to a drawing.

Contents

1. Introduction
2. A tree studied from nature
3. Sketchbooks as portable memory
4. The Oxbow: tracing, panorama and composition
5. Architecture and the uncertain purpose of a wash drawing
6. Figure drawing and classical study
7. Planning The Course of Empire
8. From a July field record to Crawford Notch
9. Later studies, tracings and surviving collections
10. The sketchbook as an object, and an Italian sheet

A tree studied from nature

From Nature is an unusually revealing place to begin. Cole made this ink drawing near Pittsburgh in spring 1823. Its inscription gives a precise date, 20 May, as well as the claim that he worked from nature. The sheet belongs to the Albany Institute of History & Art, accession 1965.68.1. It concentrates on a damaged tree stump rather than a spacious landscape: the object’s awkward, branching structure becomes the entire subject. ^[2]

The emphasis on a single form brings the viewer close. Instead of placing the stump within a distant woodland, Cole gives its exposed roots and projecting limbs the attention usually reserved for a more conspicuous subject. The surrounding paper allows the silhouette to remain legible. Darkness gathers where lines accumulate, while relatively open passages keep the wood from becoming one undifferentiated mass. Looking moves between the overall shape and the smaller changes that give it weight.

Tim Barringer’s catalogue discussion connects Cole’s disciplined parallel pen strokes with his earlier training in line engraving. Barringer also sees an animated body in the stump: roots and branches suggest limbs, grasping hands and hair. This is an interpretation of how the forms operate, rather than evidence that Cole intended a particular human character. It helps explain why the drawing can feel expressive without abandoning careful attention to an actual tree. ^[2]

The sheet’s title therefore raises a useful question. Drawing from nature does not mean drawing without selection. Cole chose this stump, isolated it and devoted his marks to its irregular structure. Its damaged state could be described in botanical terms, but its twists also invite an emotional response. Observation and imagination meet within the drawing itself, before any later painting gives the motif a larger narrative setting.

Christopher Riopelle places such early tree studies within Cole’s developing store of visual information. A related gnarled trunk appeared in View of Monte Video in 1828, and Cole took American sketchbooks with him to Europe so that he could continue painting scenes from home. Riopelle’s comparison establishes a recurring kind of motif; it does not require the 1823 sheet to be identified as the exact pattern copied into that later canvas. The broader connection is between sustained looking and material available for future invention. ^[3]

Sketchbooks as portable memory

A sketchbook could preserve more than an outline. Its pages could hold a date, a direction, a description of colour or a reminder that an important feature continued beyond the edge of the drawing. These additions made an image usable after the immediate encounter had ended. They also make the act of observation visible to us: the artist was deciding what he would need to know when the scene was no longer before him.

Cole’s Florence drawing, dated 15 June 1831 and made half an hour before sunset, provides a European example. Barringer describes its careful architectural detail and extended format across the gutter of an open sketchbook. The cathedral, bell tower and Palazzo della Signoria gave the broad city prospect identifiable points within its spread. The page opening supplied more room for a panorama than a single leaf would have allowed. ^[4]

This physical arrangement matters. A panorama asks the eye to travel sideways while keeping distant landmarks in relation to one another. A sketchbook opening can accommodate that movement, though its central fold remains part of the object. Cole’s record combines the breadth of the view with the concentration needed to distinguish particular buildings. A distant city is made manageable through a series of specific forms.

The date and time place the record within a changing light. They do not turn graphite into a complete account of sunset colour, but they give the later reader information the lines alone cannot supply. A note can state a condition without illustrating it. In this respect the sketchbook belongs as much to the organisation of knowledge as to the production of attractive images.

Riopelle distinguishes the information supplied by monochrome drawings from the colour and tone that Cole increasingly recorded through outdoor oil sketches in Italy. He dates the documented adoption of that practice to Florence in mid-1831, while noting that Cole continued drawing in pen and ink. The new medium extended his resources. It did not make drawing obsolete, and a work painted in oil on paper remains an oil painting despite its portable support and small scale. ^[3]

The Oxbow: tracing, panorama and composition

The preparations for The Oxbow show why individual sheets must be identified before they are compared. Cole’s Mount Holyoke, Massachusetts, about 1829–31, is a graphite tracing after Basil Hall’s published view. Hall’s 1829 etching derived from observations made with a camera lucida, an optical aid for recording outlines. Cole’s tracing belongs to Detroit, accession 39.70. It records his engagement with another person’s image of the prospect. ^[5]

His Panorama of the Oxbow on the Connecticut River as seen from Mount Holyoke is a separate drawing, in graphite on off-white wove paper, accession 39.566.66. Detroit dates it about 1832; the 2018 exhibition catalogue associates the field drawing with Cole’s ascent in August 1833. These are different dating statements, which should remain distinguishable. The secure relationship is that the drawing supplied observations for the large painting completed in 1836. ^{[6] [5]}

The panorama contains a dense mixture of drawn forms and written information. Kornhauser describes directional notes, descriptions of woodland and meadow, the colour of rock and the kinds of trees in the meadows. Cole also noted the ferry’s position beyond the right edge. The drawing was therefore more than a beautiful curve of river. It was a record of how different pieces of the landscape occupied space and how their appearances might be reconstructed later. ^[5]

Its viewpoint differs from Hall’s. Cole’s more elevated prospect gives the river bend a broader, more circular appearance and includes foreground ledges. Those ledges would become important in the painting, where the near ground makes room for the artist and his equipment. The distinction between the tracing and the field panorama is consequential: studying an existing print and looking from the mountain generated related but different visual knowledge. ^[5]

The final composition required another transformation. Cole made a small study in oil and graphite on composition board, now at the Metropolitan Museum. Dorothy Mahon’s technical examination revealed a graphite design beneath its paint and a corresponding drawn arrangement beneath the large canvas. A ruled horizontal registration line helped Cole relate the two formats. The drawing under the small study was transferred before its design had been covered by oil paint. ^[7]

That sequence complicates a simple progression from finished sketch to finished picture. Drawing, transfer and painting overlapped. Cole could establish the river’s shape and the movement of weather through searching lines, then develop colour relationships while the larger work was also taking shape. Mahon’s examination also identifies an earlier open umbrella in the underdrawing, changed in the painted image. A small revision can alter the foreground’s silhouette without overturning the whole composition. ^[7]

Drawing survives here in several conditions: as an independent sheet, as a tracing and as marks concealed by paint. The same technical study found architectural ideas beneath The Oxbow related to The Consummation of Empire. These are abandoned drawn experiments, rather than a completed Empire painting hidden under the landscape. Treating the evidence precisely allows us to see the canvas as a place where Cole tested ideas before settling its visible subject. ^[7]

Architecture and the uncertain purpose of a wash drawing

Architecture demanded a different balance of precision and atmosphere. During his visit to Newstead Abbey in August 1830, Cole studied the Gothic façade, including its window tracery and sculptural detail. A surviving Detroit drawing of the building uses pen and black ink over graphite. Its marks record features that would be difficult to retain accurately through memory alone. ^[8]

Effect for Newstead Abbey, Nottinghamshire, England, also dated 1830, works differently. Brown wash lies over graphite on off-white wove paper; the sheet belongs to Detroit, accession 39.316. The underlying drawing organises the building, while the wash distributes light and darkness through the scene. In Shannon Vittoria’s description, the paper remains visible in bright passages on the façade and in reflections on the lake. Unpainted areas actively produce illumination. ^[8]

This is a useful contrast with the early ink stump. Line makes the stump’s divisions and twists articulate; wash can gather an entire building or part of a landscape into a common shadow. The Newstead sheet asks us to compare broad tonal areas as well as contours. The architecture becomes one component in a changing atmosphere, though it retains enough specificity to identify the place.

Its function remains uncertain. Vittoria proposes that Cole may have used it while preparing his exhibition painting, Newstead Abbey—Sunrise. She also allows that it could have followed the painting as preparation for a reproductive mezzotint. Cole considered such a print, but the project was not realised. Neither possibility should be converted into a settled chronology simply because the title begins with “Effect for”. ^[8]

The case demonstrates why “study” and “sketch” need care. A smaller work can investigate an idea before a painting, preserve it afterwards or help translate it into another medium. Cole’s surviving oil attempts at Newstead belong to the painting side of that history. The brown wash sheet is a drawing, and its uncertain place in the sequence is itself part of what is known about the object.

Figure drawing and classical study

Cole’s reputation as a landscape painter can obscure his effort to study figures. The Ilissos, from the Parthenon West Pediment, dated 1829 or 1830, is drawn in black chalk heightened with white chalk on greyish blue wove paper. It belongs to Detroit, accession 39.474. The subject is a reclining male sculpture from the Parthenon, traditionally associated with a river god, possibly Ilissos. The identification of the sculpted figure is qualified in the catalogue. ^[9]

The use of two chalks on coloured paper supplies a range unavailable to a simple dark outline on white. The paper can serve as an intermediate tone, with darker and lighter marks distinguishing the figure’s modelling. A reclining body also presents an extended sequence of connected masses: the draughtsman must relate torso, limbs and supporting pose rather than record one isolated contour. The task differs from copying a flat architectural elevation.

Barringer judges Cole’s copy tentative beside Benjamin Robert Haydon’s stronger study of the same sculpture. That comparison locates the drawing within a process of learning. It should not make the sheet merely an unsuccessful attempt at someone else’s accomplishment. It records Cole’s access to classical sculpture in London and his willingness to undertake a discipline beyond the landscape subjects on which he had already built a reputation. ^[9]

His later training included life study in Florence. Riopelle explains that improving the figural component of his art was one purpose of the European journey, and the catalogue chronology records permission to attend life-model sessions in December 1831. Calling Cole self-taught can describe much of his early development, but it does not account for every stage of his education. Drawing was one means by which he sought instruction and challenged his existing abilities. ^{[3] [10]}

Watch: Thomas Cole

Choose a film to explore the artist’s work, its interpretation and its wider setting.

Thomas Cole: Painting the American Landscape (remastered audio)

Thomas Cole National Historic Site

An introduction to Cole’s landscapes and artistic ambitions.

Watch on YouTube

▶01 · WatchPainting the American landscapeThomas Cole National Historic Site▶02 · WatchEden to EmpireThe National Gallery

Planning The Course of Empire

The 1833 Layout for The Course of Empire is another kind of drawing altogether. In pen and brown ink over graphite, it sets out the relationship of the five paintings commissioned by Luman Reed. Detroit holds the sheet, accession 39.351. Its importance lies less in the development of a tree or figure than in the organisation of several works into one visual argument. ^[11]

The diagram gives the central Consummation a larger format and places the other stages on either side. It allows the scale and relationships of the cycle to be considered together. A viewer confronting five separate paintings can move between successive states of the same imagined landscape; Cole’s layout considers how that movement might be supported by their arrangement. Drawing here mediates between a narrative idea, differently sized canvases and a patron’s interior. ^[11]

The precise architectural setting has been described differently in scholarly accounts. The reliable point is the hierarchy established by the diagram, rather than a complete reconstruction of Reed’s room. The catalogue also distinguishes this layout from the luminous small oil studies prepared for individual panels. Those paintings test colour and light; the diagram establishes a relationship among objects. Both contribute to The Course of Empire through distinct tasks. ^[11]

From a July field record to Crawford Notch

Cole’s detailed drawing of Crawford Notch provides an especially clear comparison between observation and revision. He visited the White Mountains with Asher B. Durand in 1839 and was at the notch by 3 July. His pencil record survives in a sketchbook at Princeton University. Franklin Kelly describes its extensive notations and careful attention to the mountains, the pass and the Notch House, an inn opened by the Crawfords in 1828. ^[12]

Even the drawing involves selection and exaggeration. Kelly notes that Mount Webster appears too steep and that the walls of the notch stand too close together. The sheet is detailed without being an impartial measurement of the terrain. Its compressed relationships give the place force, making the passage between mountain walls more emphatic. This is a valuable reminder that invention need not wait until Cole begins painting. ^[12]

In the finished White Mountains painting, the foreground became more ordered. Cole replaced a confusing group of stumps with two blasted trees framing the composition and two sawn stumps nearer its centre. He moved the barn, clarified the road and introduced travellers, including a rider and a distant stagecoach. The road gives the eye a route towards the inn and through the pass, making passage through the landscape part of its human story. ^[12]

The season and weather also changed. The autumn colour could not have been observed on that July visit, and Kelly identifies the painting’s elaborate atmospheric drama as an invention beyond the lightly indicated sky in the drawing. The result is grounded in a recognisable place while composing an experience that no single encounter supplied. The inn is the Notch House; the painting does not depict the destruction of the Willey family’s house in the 1826 disaster associated with the region. ^[12]

Later studies, tracings and surviving collections

The National Gallery of Art’s Study for The Mountain Ford, 1846, offers a later example of drawing connected to a named painting. It combines graphite and white chalk on grey wove paper. Its sheet measures 17.46 × 24.92 cm, larger than the recorded image area, and its accession is 2015.19.772. It entered the National Gallery with the Corcoran Collection. These details distinguish the drawing from the Metropolitan Museum’s oil painting of the same year. ^[13]

A title linking a drawing to a finished work provides a secure starting point, but it does not by itself prove every step of transfer or revision. For The Mountain Ford, the identifiable sheet and its materials deserve attention without attaching an undocumented outdoor location to the scene. The broader lesson from the better documented Oxbow and Notch comparisons is to ask which features persist, which shift and what the change does to the viewer’s experience.

Tracings could also carry a composition forward after its completion. Kelly documents Cole’s decision, with his nephew Henry Bayless on 22 November 1840, to make full-size tracings of The Voyage of Life. He took these records to Europe and used them when making the second set in Rome. Fragments survive. This was drawing used to retain access to an arrangement that the artist might otherwise lose when the original canvases left his possession. ^[14]

Survival is consequently uneven. Independent sheets, sketchbooks, fragments and underlying marks in paintings provide different kinds of evidence. Detroit holds examples across several of these drawing practices, while Albany’s Thomas Cole’s Paper Trail exhibition in 2018 placed early tree studies alongside letters, poems and prints. Princeton’s Notch sketch and Washington’s Mountain Ford study extend that picture. The collections preserve related parts of a working life rather than one complete sequence for every painting. ^{[6] [12] [13] [15]}

Looking across those objects brings us back to the difference between their purposes. Cole could follow a root with patient lines, use notes to retain a broad prospect, model a classical body or draw a plan almost without descriptive detail. Drawing made these different acts possible. Its intimacy lies in the visible decisions: where he slowed down, what he labelled, what he retained and what he chose to change.

The sketchbook as an object, and an Italian sheet

Princeton’s Sketchbook of 1839–1844 survives as a substantial physical object: cream wove paper bound in marbled boards, with a brown leather spine and corners. The album measures 29.1 × 43.8 × 2 cm. The museum records three missing leaves and blank pages among those remaining. Its incompleteness matters because a surviving sequence can preserve only part of the artist’s work. Dates on a cover cannot securely date every undated drawing inside. The book was acquired from Cole’s granddaughter Florence Cole Vincent at his Catskill studio and entered Princeton as a gift of Frank Jewett Mather Jr. ^[16]

Cover of Thomas Cole’s Sketchbook, 1839–1844. Marbled boards, leather spine and corners; Princeton University Art Museum, gift of Frank Jewett Mather Jr., x1940-78.1-.27. The cover is reproduced here, rather than an unidentified internal drawing. Image: Thomas Cole; Princeton University Art Museum. Public domain; museum free-access download. Resized.

Louis Hawes’s 1956 study identified two dated Catskill river views on opposite sides of one leaf: 9 September 1842 and 5 August 1844. They record related terrain from different angles. A sketchbook can thus bring separate visits together on facing or consecutive surfaces, making geographic proximity seem immediate even when years divide the acts of looking. Hawes’s reading is especially useful when combined with the museum’s object record: the book’s material continuity should not be mistaken for an uninterrupted itinerary. ^[17]

The small Italian Landscape at the Walters Art Museum offers a complementary example outside that album. Dated about 1832, it is pencil on paper heightened with white, measuring 13.9 × 21 cm. The pale additions work with the paper’s tone to establish light, rather than requiring colour to distinguish the architectural forms. A tower and arches gather the scene into an imagined or selected architectural prospect; the collection record does not identify a precise viewpoint. ^[18]

This sheet also has a later collecting history. It was formerly housed in one of William T. Walters’s drawing albums, then passed to Henry Walters in 1894 and to the museum by bequest in 1931. The recorded “T. Cole” at lower left is described as a signature or possible later inscription. That qualification should remain visible: a name written on a drawing and a securely documented autograph signature are different kinds of evidence. ^[18]

Selected Thomas Cole Drawings

Study for The Mountain Ford

1846. Graphite and white chalk on grey wove paper. National Gallery of Art, 2015.19.772.

Tree Trunks

1825–1840. Pen and black ink, wash and graphite on wove paper. National Gallery of Art, 2015.19.607.

Frequently Asked Questions

References

1. Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, “Manifesto for an American Sublime: Thomas Cole’s The Oxbow”, in Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings, 2018, printed p. 68. Catalogue.
2. Tim Barringer, catalogue entry 10, From Nature, in Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings, 2018, printed pp. 133–134. Catalogue.
3. Christopher Riopelle, “Thomas Cole and the Landscape Oil Sketch”, in Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings, 2018, printed pp. 96–105, especially pp. 96–97 and 102–105. Essay.
4. Tim Barringer, “Thomas Cole’s Atlantic Crossings”, in Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings, 2018, printed p. 45. Essay.
5. Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, catalogue entries 47–50, Mount Holyoke print, tracing, panorama and oil study, in Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings, 2018, printed pp. 198–201. Catalogue.
6. Detroit Institute of Arts, Panorama of the Oxbow on the Connecticut River as seen from Mount Holyoke, collection record, accessed 2026, accession 39.566.66. Object record.
7. Dorothy Mahon, “Thomas Cole’s The Oxbow and The Consummation of Empire: A Technical Comparison”, in Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings, 2018, printed pp. 106–115, especially pp. 108–111. Technical study.
8. Shannon Vittoria, catalogue entry 22, Effect for Newstead Abbey, Nottinghamshire, England, in Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings, 2018, printed pp. 156–158; fig. 105 identifies the architectural drawing. Catalogue.
9. Tim Barringer, catalogue entry 23, The Ilissos, from the Parthenon West Pediment, in Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings, 2018, printed pp. 159–160. Catalogue.
10. Shannon Vittoria, chronology, in Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings, 2018, printed p. 253, European studies in 1831. Chronology.
11. Tim Barringer, catalogue entry 52, Layout for The Course of Empire, in Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings, 2018, printed pp. 204–205. Catalogue.
12. Franklin Kelly, A View of the Mountain Pass Called the Notch of the White Mountains (Crawford Notch), in American Paintings of the Nineteenth Century, Part I, National Gallery of Art, 1996, printed pp. 88–94, especially pp. 89–92 and fig. 4. Catalogue.
13. National Gallery of Art, Study for “The Mountain Ford”, 1846, collection record, accession 2015.19.772, accessed 2026. Object record.
14. Franklin Kelly, The Voyage of Life, in American Paintings of the Nineteenth Century, Part I, National Gallery of Art, 1996, printed pp. 98–100, full-size tracings and fig. 6. Catalogue.
15. Albany Institute of History & Art, Thomas Cole’s Paper Trail, exhibition description, 2018, exhibition 16 June–25 November 2018. Exhibition text.
16. Princeton University Art Museum, Thomas Cole, Sketchbook, 1839–1844, x1940-78.1-.27, collection record and museum object API, accessed 6 October 2026. Source.
17. Louis Hawes, “A Sketchbook by Thomas Cole”, Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University 15, no. 1 (1956), pp. 2–23, especially pp. 6–10 and 18–20; figs. 2, 5 and 6. Source.
18. Walters Art Museum, Thomas Cole, Italian Landscape, ca. 1832, 37.1578, collection record, accessed 6 October 2026. Source.
19. Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser and Tim Barringer, Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings (2018). Career context and artwork/study metadata: catalogue entries 10–66 and chronology, PDF pp. 137–231 and 249–262; related Barringer essay passages, PDF pp. 23–66.
20. Franklin Kelly et al., American Paintings of the Nineteenth Century, Part I (National Gallery of Art, 1996). Cole catalogue and both Voyage of Life sets, PDF pp. 91–124.
21. National Gallery of Art, Study for The Mountain Ford (1846), accession 2015.19.772. Collection record and open-access image.
22. National Gallery of Art, Tree Trunks (1825–1840), accession 2015.19.607. Collection metadata and open-access image.
23. Splash image source.

    Thomas Cole, Italian Landscape, ca. 1832. Pencil on paper heightened with white, 13.9 × 21 cm. Acquired by William T. Walters, Walters Art Museum, 37.1578. CC0. · Source · CC0 1.0