Thomas Cole started a whole American art movement, and then painted the pictures that proved it was worth starting. If you want big country under a big sky on your wall, this is where you begin.
He was born in 1801 in England and died in 1848 in the United States, which makes him Anglo-American in the truest sense. European painting shaped his eye, but what he did with it was entirely his own, and the Hudson River School grew out of it. He worked in oil on canvas, mostly landscapes and history paintings, and he worked constantly across a career that was not nearly long enough.
These are demanding charts, and I will not pretend otherwise. Nothing here sits below Level 4. The Oxbow, Connecticut River Near Northampton and Notch of the White Mountains are your gentlest way in at Level 4, and both give you that sweeping valley view Cole is known for. The Course of Empire, Desolation is also Level 4 and one of my favorites to stitch, all crumbling stone and quiet. Step up to Level 5 and you are into The Course of Empire, Destruction and The Hunter's Return, which are long projects with a lot of shading in the middle distance. Most of the rest fall between those two levels. Landscape cross stitch of this kind rewards patience more than speed. Work on 18-count Aida, frame it, and hang it where the light hits.
If Cole pulls you in, Frederic Edwin Church is the obvious next stop. Cole taught him, and Church took the same country and pushed it further; there are eleven of his charts here. Martin Johnson Heade painted alongside them both in the Hudson River School and has the largest collection of the group at fourteen. For something a little different within the same movement, look at Robert S Duncanson and George Inness, both contemporaries working the same genre, both with a handful of counted cross stitch patterns waiting.
And if it is the painting itself you love rather than the needle, Thomas Cole art prints are easy to find.
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