Thomas Cole was born in 1801 in Lancashire, England. In his teenage years, Cole had aprenticed under an engraver of textile designs for calico. His family was Anglo-American and after Thomas’ eighteenth birthday returned to America. After his return to America, he parted ways with his family for about one year while he went to Philadelphia. While in Philidelphia he worked breifly for and engraver. After his stay in Philidelphia he rejoined his family in Stuebensville, Ohio. While staying with his family he designed prints for his father’s wall paper business.
 In his spare time, he began to practice painting oil landscapes using techniques he had learned from a painter by the name of Stein. Shortly after there move to Stuebensville, his father relocated his business to Pittsburgh. While working for his father Thomas did many sketches of landscapes in his free time.
 Thomas again traveled to Phillidelphia in 1823 with the intent to refine his painting techniques and become a landscape painter. His works during this time were inspired by the landscape painting of artists Thomas Doughty and Thomas Birch.After stduying these paintrrs landscapes in detail and a stay of one year in Phillidelphia, Cole moved on to New York City.
 It wasn’t until his stay in New TYork that Thomas Cole was recognized by the art community as a potentially worthy artist. During a a short trip along the Hudson River in 1825, Cole made a series of sketches of the landscape along the way. The sketches created from during this trip caught the eye of some of the major artist in the New York art community at the time. Due to his series of sketches, his career as a landscape artist was to become very promising. Shortly after his “discovery” he helped found the National Academy of Design in 1826.
 In 1829 Cole decided to travle to Europe to study landscape masterpeices “first hand.” During this trip he traveld through England, France and Italy. He paid particular intrests in the techniques used in painting done by those considered “Old Masters” as well as contemporary artists of the time. He also used the landscapes of sites around Europe as a basis for landscapes which incorperated European fetures with American ideals. A second trip in 1831 provided the insperation to begin incorporating historical issues into his landscapes.
 From these early years to the later years in Thoms Cole’s life, he will always be known for his mastery of the landscape painting.

It wasn’t until his return from two trips to Europe that Thomas Cole produce some of his most intreging and epic works. Upon returning to the United States he took up residence in Catskill, New York. Even though he was now somewhat isolated from the large art community of  New York City, he maintained his communication with his colleges and collectors. Here Cole created the beginnings of perhaps one of his most famous painting series’. in 1836, a New York merchant by the name of Luman Reed comissioned Cole to create his first painting series; The Course of Empire. this series would follow an epic civilizaion through its creation to its demise and ultimately to its disapearance. This was a new idea in the area of landscape painting, incorperating morality as well as symbols into the landscape.
 Cole would later paint another moraly important series of paintings called The Voyage of Life. This religiously based series captured the important cycle of nature and man. We will are born, we will age and we will die and throughout these stages in our life nature will remain a constant. After his experimentation with such areas of inspiration, he no longer felt the need to paint simply in landscapes and began incorporating more and more “biblical and antique subjects.” Before his death from Pnuemonia in 1848, at the young age of forty-seven, Thomas Cole painted many more famous paintings which captured he attention of the art community of the civilized world.