Thomas Cole is one of the founders of the Hudson River School, a painting style which dominated American art for much of the 19th century. Cabin in the Woods, circa 1848, is a fine example of Hudson River School art. In the early 19th century American artists and patrons wanted to create a style of art which was uniquely American. In landscape paintings of the frontier, American artists hoped to capture the essence of America as a New Eden, a place where man could free himself from European traditions and reach his greatest potential. This idea is conveyed in paintings by portraying the American landscape as untouched, like the original Garden of Eden. Further these paintings embodied the Transcendental concept of God's presence in nature through their awe-inspiring depictions of grand vistas, high mountains and turbulent skies. Conversely, when man was seen in such works he is usually small and frail.

In Cabin in the Woods,  man has made some inroads, quite literally, into the wilderness for a path winds from the foreground to a snug cabin in a clearing. The tree stump in the lower part of the painting and those by the cabin testify to man's battle against nature to make way for his home. To the left of the cabin a bridge crosses a stream. Yet for all these signs of civilization, the small cabin is still surrounded by dense woods and a tall mountain wreathed by clouds looms above the building. Man may be settling the wilderness, but his hold is still tenuous.

Cabin in the Woods is particularly interesting because it probably is unfinished. Thomas Cole died suddenly in 1848 and left a number of paintings incomplete. (This painting was owned by the descendents of the Cole family until 1987 and has always been dated 1848.) The foreground (that is, the lower half of the painting in the forefront of the scene) is quite bare. Usually Cole included a tangle of objects in such scenes: fallen tree trunks, vines, and tree stumps. Ellwood Parry III, a leading scholar on Cole, points out that the artist usually worked from the deep background out and therefore it would be logical in an unfinished painting to have a sparse foreground.

The addition of this painting by Thomas Cole is particularly welcome because it joins another painting already in the Hunter collection, The Symbol, by Asher B. Durand. Taken together these paintings show the poles of the Hudson River School style. Durand's painting is large, focusing on a grand sweep of majestic mountains in an unnamed locale and is based on a literary source (the poem The Deserted Village by Oliver Goldsmith). Cole's Cabin in the Woods  focuses on a distinctly American view and its size and subject matter are more intimate in scale.

Thomas Cole was a largely self-taught painter. He was born in England and moved with his family to Philadelphia in 1818. He had worked in England and during his early years in America as an assistant woodblock engraver in the production of fabrics and wallpaper. Soon after moving to America he met an itinerant artist who taught him the rudiments of painting. After this beginning, Cole began teaching himself by doing many drawings of scenes around him in the city and on trips into the woods and later by studying the works of other artists whose work he admired such as Thomas Doughty and Thomas Birch.

In 1825 he settled in New York City and when he showed a series of works he produced following a sketching trip up the Hudson River, his paintings attracted the attention of the city's leading artists and patrons. He was soon recognized as the leading landscape painter in the country, a distinction he held until his death.

He travelled to Europe several times to study paintings there and such journeys further helped developed his style. Many of his paintings -- and the works his patrons most frequently requested -- were of realistic landscape views, like Cabin in the Woods. But Cole also produced other types of paintings, most notably allegorical paintings such as The Course of Empire, a series of four paintings depicting the rise and fall of civilization. He particularly encouraged the careers of two artists, Asher Durand and Frederic Church, both of whom would continue his legacy of nationalistic landscape painting. Cole died suddenly in 1848 after a brief illness.