Italian Coast Scene with Ruined Tower

1838

Thomas Cole

Painter, American, 1801 - 1848

We look across a rocky, grass-covered promontory at a crumbling, round brick tower overlooking topaz-blue water in this horizontal landscape painting. Golden sunlight warms the face of the tower and throws the steep outcropping below into deep shadow. To the right of center, the brown stone tower is partially overgrown with climbing ivy and other vegetation. About two dozen white sheep and several sienna-brown goats lie or stand scattered around the narrow ring of grass that surrounds the tower. A young man with pale skin and dark hair, wearing a ginger-brown toga, watches over the six sheep and two goats on the side of the tower closest to us. The shepherd’s staff has a hooked end, and he sits facing away from us on parchment-white stones that may be carved fragments of a large building. The promontory holding the tower has steep, vertical sides that dip into shadow, and lower hills fill the bottom left corner of the painting. Three more rocky outcroppings jut up in the smooth waters of the ocean in the distance, and a solitary ship, tiny in scale, sails near the middle formation. The still surface of the water reflects the towering, puffy white and lavender-purple clouds that line the horizon, which comes almost halfway up the canvas. A white disk, presumably the moon, hangs low near the horizon to our left. A few thin, lilac-purple clouds stretch across the sky closer to the top edge of the painting. The artist signed the work as if he had written his name on the face of a rock near the lower right corner, so the last letter is partially obscured by another rock: “T.Cole.”

Media Options

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Thomas Cole, generally considered America's first important landscape painter, first traveled to Europe in 1829. In London that year he saw and admired the English painter John Constable's great Hadleigh Castle: The Mouth of the Thames–Morning after a Stormy Night, (1829, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven), which depicted a ruined medieval tower standing on a high hill. While in Italy in 1831-1832, Cole saw and sketched similar scenes and upon his return to America painted a number of fine pictures of circular towers set in lonely landscapes. Cole began this painting to fulfill a commission for a scene from Byron's narrative poem, "The Corsair." Encountering difficulties with that subject, he shifted to a different source, Coleridge's introduction to "The Ballad of the Dark Ladie," which includes lines describing a moonlit scene with a ruined medieval tower. However, as Cole struggled to bring the painting to completion, he was beset by doubts and his mood became troubled. As he recorded in his journal on May 19, 1838:

When I remember the great works produced by the masters, how paltry seem the productions of my own pencil; how unpromising the prospect of ever producing pictures that shall delight, and improve posterity, and be regarded with admiration and respect. [1]

Feeling shackled by the demands of illustrating someone else's imagery, Cole abandoned his poetic sources and made the picture into something more purely his own. A few days later, on 22 May 1838, he wrote in his journal:

I am now engaged in painting a Picture representing a Ruined & Solitary Tower that stands on a craggy promontory whose base is laved by a calm unruffled ocean...I think it will be poetical, there is a stillness, a loneliness about it that may reach the Imagination. [2]

Italian Coast Scene with Ruined Tower, probably the work Cole exhibited in Boston in 1839 as Italian Seashore, with Tower, was unknown to modern scholarship on Cole until its acquisition by the Gallery in 1993. As one of Cole's major statements on the theme of the mutability of man's creations and the transience of life, it may be seen as a pictorial version of ideas he also expressed in poetry:

Or is it that the fading light reminds / That we are mortal and the latter day / Steals onward swiftly, like unseen winds,And all our years are clouds that pass quickly away. [3]

(Text by Franklin Kelly, published in the National Gallery of Art exhibition catalogue Art for the Nation, 2002)

More information on this painting can be found in the Gallery publication American Paintings of the Nineteenth Century, Part I, pages 81-87, which is available as a free PDF at https://www.nga.gov/content/dam/ngaweb/research/publications/pdfs/american-paintings-19th-century-part-1.pdf

Notes

1. Quoted in Louis Legrand Noble, The Life and Works of Thomas Cole, ed. Elliot S. Vesell (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), 195-196.

2. Noble 1964.

3. "Evening Thoughts," in Marshall B. Tymn, ed., Thomas Cole's Poetry (York, Pa., 1972), 78-79.

On View

West Building Main Floor, Gallery 64

Artwork overview

Artwork history & notes

Provenance

Possibly Hugh D. Scott, Boston, Massachusetts; his daughter, Helen Livingston Scott Greenway [1903-1980], Wellesley and Needham, Massachusetts;[1] her son, James C. Greenway III, Fairfield, Connecticut, and Easton, Maryland, 1962-1993; sold 1 November 1993 through (Martin Chasin Fine Arts, Fairfield, Connecticut) to NGA.
[1] A temporary loan label on the stretcher from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, states that the picture was lent to the museum by Mrs. Augustin H. Parker, Charles River, Massachusetts, from January to April 1934 (information provided by Eric Hirschler, Assistant Curator of American Paintings, MFA, in a telephone conversation with Franklin Kelly, 22 June 1993). According to James C. Greenway III, no one by that name ever owned the painting; his mother, Helen Livingston Scott Greenway, did, however, reside on Charles River Street in Boston at one point during the time she owned the picture (information provided by Martin Chasin, in a telephone conversation with Franklin Kelly, 31 October 1995).

Associated Names

Exhibition History

1839

  • Possibly Athenaeum Gallery, Boston, 1839, no. 140, as Italian Seashore, with Tower.

2000

  • Art for the Nation: Collecting for a New Century, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2000-2001, unnumbered catalogue, repro.

2007

  • America! Storie di pittura dal Nuovo Mondo, Museo di Santa Giulia, Brescia, 2007-2008, no. 66, pl. 66.

  • Loan to display with permanent collection, Academy Art Museum, Easton, Maryland, 2007, no cat.

Bibliography

1853

  • Noble, Louis Legrand. The Course of Empire, Voyage of Life, and other Pictures of Thomas Cole, N.A. New York, 1853: 263-264.

1945

  • Goldwater, Robert, and Marco Treves, eds. Artists on Art. New York, 1945: 281-282.

1964

  • An Exhibition of Paintings by Thomas Cole, N.A., from the Artist's Studio, Catskill, New York. Exh. cat. Kennedy Galleries, New York, 1964: 13.

  • Noble, Louis Legrand. The Life and Works of Thomas Cole (1853). Edited by Elliot S. Vesell. Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1964: 196.

1969

  • Novak, Barbara. American Painting of the Nineteenth Century: Realism, Idealism, and the American Experience. New York, 1969: 73-74.

1983

  • Chambers, Bruce W. "Thomas Cole and the Ruined Tower." Currier Gallery of Art Bulletin (1983): 32.

1988

  • Parry, Ellwood C., III. The Art of Thomas Cole: Ambition and Imagination. Newark, London, and Toronto, 1988: 200-202, 208.

1989

  • Parry, Ellwood C., III. "On Return from Arcadia in 1832." In Irma B. Jaffe, ed., The Italian Presence in American Art, 1760-1860. New York and Rome, 1989.

1994

  • Kelly, Franklin. Jasper Francis Cropsey: The Spirit of War and the Spirit of Peace. Exh. cat. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1994: 3.

1996

  • Kelly, Franklin, with Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., Deborah Chotner, and John Davis. American Paintings of the Nineteenth Century, Part I. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. Washington, D.C., 1996: 81-87, color repro.

Inscriptions

lower right: T.Cole [last letter partially obscured by rock]

Wikidata ID

Q19899757

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