Questroyal 2009

Con Amore In January 1844 , Thomas Cole wrote to his patron, Charles Parker, to present an outline of his next commissioned work. After assuring Parker that the ultimate choice would be his, Cole suggested a pendant pair with the titles L’Allegro and Il Penseroso ( 1845 , Los Angeles CountyMuseumof Art), adding: “I hope the subject will suit your taste, for it is one on which I can work con amore .” 5 Parker must have consented to the artist’s preference (and en- thusiasm), for Cole finished both works the following year. Ellwood C. Parry asserts that Italian Landscape was created as a study for the first painting in the pair, L’Allegro . 6 Cole’s plan for the finished painting to “represent a sunny luxuriant landscape, with figures engaged in gay pastimes or pleasant occupation” is mirrored in this smaller study. 7 Although figures are absent, the gemlike landscape radiates with soft light suffused over the distant mountain, sylvan hills, and verdurous valley. The scene also bears similari- ties to Cole’s earlier masterpiece, The Dream of Arcadia ( 1838 , Denver Art Museum), in its division of space and use of repoussoir trees—an observation made by Parry as well as Cole scholar AlanWallach. 8 — jlw Cole’s paintings are in the collections of almost every major museum worldwide, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, National Gallery of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Musée du Louvre. 1 “The Fine Arts,” The New-York Mirror: aWeekly Gazette of Literature and the Fine Arts 18 , no. 4 (July 18, 1840 ): 29 . 2 Charles Lanman, “Cole’s Imaginative Paintings,” The United States Magazine, and Democratic Review 12 , no. 60 (June 1843 ): 598 . 3 Thomas Cole, “Lecture on American Scenery,” Northern Light; Devoted to Free Discussion and to the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, Miscellaneous Literature, and General Intelligence 1 , no. 2 (May 1841 ): 25 . 4 William Cullen Bryant, A funeral oration occasioned by the death of Thomas Cole: delivered before the National Academy of Design, NewYork, May 4, 1948 (NewYork: D. Appleton; Philadelphia: G.S. Appleton, 1848 ), p. 37 . 5 Thomas Cole to Charles Parker, New York, January 8, 1844 , in Louis Legrand Noble, The Life andWorks of Thomas Cole , ed. Elliot S. Vesell (New York: Black Dome Press, 1997 ), p. 266 . 6 Ellwood C. Parry III , The Art of Thomas Cole, Ambition and Imagination (Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Press, 1988 ), p. 309 . 7 Cole to Parker, 266 . 8 Parry, p. 309; AlanWallach, “Thomas Cole’s Italian Landscape ” (Authenticity report, August , 15, 2009 ), p. 1. [W]hen I consider with what mastery, yet with what reverence he copied the forms of nature, and how he blended with them the profoundest human sympathies, and made them the vehicle, as God has made them, of great truths and great lessons, when I see how directly he learned his art from the creation around him, and how resolutely he took his own way to greatness, I say within myself, this man will be reverenced in future years as a great master in art; he has opened a way in which only men endued with rare strength of genius can follow him. william cullen bryant, poet, 1848 4 Plate 11 Italian Landscape , detail