The American Scene including Important Photographs from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation

The American Scene including Important Photographs from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation

View full screen - View 1 of Lot 1050. Mount Chocorua, White Mountains.

Thomas Cole

Mount Chocorua, White Mountains

Lot Closed

May 24, 05:49 PM GMT

Estimate

150,000 - 250,000 USD

Lot Details

Description

Thomas Cole

1801-1848

Mount Chocorua, White Mountains


oil on panel

9 3/4 by 15 in.

25 by 38 cm.

Executed circa 1827.


This work is accompanied by a research report completed by leading Thomas Cole scholar Dr. Alan Wallach.

(probably) Florence Cole Vincent, New York (acquired by descent directly from the artist)

Private Collection, New York (acquired from the above in 1969)

[with] Mark Lasalle Fine Art, Albany, New York (acquired from the above in 2014)

Acquired from the above in 2014 by the present owner

Thomas Cole visited the White Mountains of New Hampshire for the first time in the summer of 1827, after the rise in landscape tourism in New England began attracting tourists to the region. Cole's patron Daniel Wadsworth, founder of the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, Connecticut, insisted that the artist explore the area and provided him an itinerary to do so. Cole visited the White Mountains again in October of 1828, and kept a diary of the trip in one of his sketchbooks. In an entry dated October 3, 1828 he wrote, "We gained the summit [of Mount Chocorua] and were rewarded for our labours/A sublime prospect opened on every side. Lakes, mountains, streams, forests, villages & farms lay spread beneath us like a beautiful carpet" (Sketchbook No. 2, Detroit Institute of Arts, cited in Ellwood C. Parry III, The Art of Thomas Cole: Ambition and Imagination, 1988, p. 81, as quoted in Alan Wallach's report).


Cole returned to the White Mountains on several occasions throughout the 1820s and '30s, and Mount Chocorua became one of his favorite subjects to illustrate. He ultimately produced as many as twenty paintings from nine different views of Mount Chocorua. With its dramatically decaying branches, a centrally positioned idyllic waterfall, and dreamy clouds, the present work epitomizes the artist's approach to sublime landscapes.