Thomas Cole’s Refrain: The Paintings of Catskill Creek

Thomas Cole’s Refrain: The Paintings of Catskill Creek, will illuminate masterpieces from major museums and private collections, and explore the deeper meanings of Cole’s Catskill Creek paintings, considered as an integral series, for the first time. The exhibition is based on new scholarship developed by H. Daniel Peck, Exhibition Curator and the John Guy Vassar, Jr., Professor Emeritus of English at Vassar College, in his book of the same title, published by Three Hills, an imprint of Cornell University Press. Created during the eighteen-year period between 1827 and 1845, which spans Thomas Cole’s mature career, the artist’s paintings of Catskill Creek constitute the most sustained sequence of landscape paintings he ever made.

The exhibition includes twelve original oil paintings by Thomas Cole, and represented, as well, are paintings of the Catskill Creek scene by leading nineteenth-century artists who were inspired by Cole: Asher B. Durand, Frederic Edwin Church, and Charles Herbert Moore. The works include Cole paintings from private collections that have rarely been seen in public: View Near Catskill, 1828–29, and Settler’s Home in the Catskills, 1842, as well as major works from the collections of the New-York Historical Society, Yale University Art Gallery, The National Gallery of Art, Albany Institute of History and Art, Olana State Historic Site, the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, and The Currier Museum of Art.

The view of the Catskill Mountains that frames the Catskill Creek in Cole’s paintings can still be enjoyed from the Thomas Cole National Historic Site today, and a stretch of land along Catskill Creek has been preserved as a public park by Scenic Hudson and Greene Land Trust.