It’s not often than an artist gets to have an entire movement or style of art credited to them, but that’s exactly what we have with Thomas Cole, who is considered the founding member of the Hudson River School.

The Hudson River School was not just an art movement, but the first American art movement in a young country, one that began based on landscape painting in...wait for it…the Hudson River area of New York. This movement was not organized in any way, nor was Cole its leader; he was just the guy who started painting these amazing and at times idealized American landscapes. Cole also happened to be the teacher of Frederic Edwin Church who would be another “member” of the Hudson school. Church, along with Albert Bierstadt and later, Asher B. Durand, would be the leading flag-bearers of this style of American landscape painting, at least for the next several years.

Cole wasn’t only a painter, he also did some writing. Probably his most well-known work is his Essay on American Scenery, in which he expresses his opinions on the beauty and “sublimity” of American landscapes, as well as how important it is to capture the grandeur of the landscape in a painting, so that people will appreciate it. Cole REALLY liked the words “sublime” and “sublimity”; he uses them about fifteen times in his essay.

Shortly after Cole arrived in New York, he wrote a story that may be relevant to The Tempest; titled Emma Moreton. It tells the tale of a woman native to the island of Saint Eustatius in the West Indies who falls in love with an English army officer. As one can guess from his art, Cole was big on romanticism,. In this story, the woman’s parents did not approve of the relationship. It has been speculated that the people in this painting are the characters in his story, changed up to increase the “salability” for a U.S. customer. The scenery and the cabin in the background were also altered to conform to this tale, if he did indeed mean for the two to be related. The part in the story that may be related to the painting is when Emma faints at her father’s feet because she is so overcome with the emotion of having to choose between her lover and her parents.

Cole arrived in New York City in 1825 and from his records, we know he created five paintings while in his “cramped space of his studio” before he took his first trip to the Hudson River Valley. One of these paintings was listed as Storm Composition, and was sold for ten dollars to George Bruen, along with another painting listed as Tree for the bargain price of three dollars. It was Bruen who helped to finance Cole’s first trip to the Hudson River Valley in the summer of 1825, and that would begin an entire new era in the genre of American landscape painting.