Thomas Cole on architecture: picturing the gothic

Abstract

This dissertation studies Thomas Cole and the Gothic Revival. Through an examination of Cole’s paintings of landscapes and architecture, as well as his writings, this dissertation demonstrates Cole’s preference for the Gothic Revival as an architectural style, and how he visually associated the Gothic with the American wilderness and American Indians. Furthermore, by considering Cole’s beliefs in the cyclical theory of history, and the Gothic’s place within that history, it shows that Cole drew a connection between the Gothic and specific Christian spiritual implications. ☐ An in-depth analysis of the painting The Architect’s Dream, Cole’s essay “Letter to the Publick on the Subject of Architecture,” his paintings based on James Fenimore Cooper’s gothic novel The Last of the Mohicans, and his numerous landscapes with both classical and Gothic ruins reveal how Cole defined the Gothic. For Cole, the Gothic symbolized all that was wild and free as opposed to classicism’s order and control. He made the Gothic manifest through his paintings of Gothic buildings within the landscape and by drawing from the tools of gothic novelists. This dissertation establishes how Cole developed the Gothic as a pictorial trope in order to contextualize more fully our understanding of the nineteenth-century Gothic Revival.