Thomas Cole, Voyage of Life Series

While Cole did not rent an atelier in the Tenth Street Studio Building, the English-born painter (1801-1848) is generally considered the founder of the Hudson River School and Frederic Church’s mentor and teacher. Largely self-taught as an artist, he was influenced by earlier European artists such as Claude Lorrain, and English artists of the prior generation John Constable, and J.M.W Turner, all of whom had helped develop landscape as an independent genre of painting. His art was also informed by English Romanticism, and the American Transcendentalism of Thoreau and Emerson. 

Cole’s best-known works are the cycle of four narrative allegorical paintings known as The Voyage of Life ( Cole made two sets of the series. The first set is in the collection of the Munson, Utica, New York, and the second set is part of the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington). This series portrays man’s spiritual journey from childhood to old age, accompanied by angels and incorporating a rich array of symbolism.Childhood, for which this painting is a study, begins the series with the traveler as a happy baby in a gilded vessel guided by a guardian angel. Known for his pessimism regarding an American industrial society, Cole’s hope springs eternal in the symbolic rainbow-colored wings propelling the angel as he guides the boat between river banks laden with spring flowers.  Hailing from the Christian tradition, Cole’s choice of imbuing the feathers in an optical prism, is likely a tribute to the optimistic covenant made between God and Noah in Genesis 9:13, symbolized by a rainbow. 

Cole painted The Voyage of Life in 1839 for the New York Banker Samuel Ward. While the paintings were not finished at the time of Ward’s death in 1839, his heirs paid Cole to complete the commission in 1840. The artist, eager to continue exhibiting the series after he surrendered the works to the Ward family, wanted to paint a second version. Cole traced the original paintings and executed oil studies of the figures, including this depiction of the figures and boat in childhood.