The Angel Appearing to the Shepherds

This very large oil on canvas painting exhibits the Biblical story from the book of Luke. The upper left corner of the canvas is filled with the aura and light of the 		Thomas Cole
American | English (1801-1848)
The Angel Appearing to the Shepherds, 1833-1834
Oil on canvas
Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr. in memory of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch
American Art
Location:  Exhibit, Gallery 206
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Dimensions:  H: 101 1/2 in, W: 185 1/2 in
Object ID: 80.30

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This very large oil on canvas painting exhibits the Biblical story from the book of Luke. The upper left corner of the canvas is filled with the aura and light of the
Thomas Cole
Bolton-le-Moor, England 1801-1848 Catskill, N.Y.
The Angel Appearing to the Shepherds, 1833-34
Oil on canvas, 101 1/2 × 185 1/2 in. (257.8 × 471 cm)
Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., in Memory of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch, 80.30

References: Ellwood C. Parry III, The Art of Thomas Cole: Ambition and Imagination, Newark, Del., 1988, pp. 119-20, 149-51, 153-54; Harrison, 1991, p. 92; William H. Truettner, Alan Wallach et al., Thomas Cole, Landscape into History, New Haven, 1994, p. 46.

Thomas Cole was America's first great landscape painter and the progenitor of the influential group of mid-­nineteenth-century New York landscapists known as the Hudson River School (see objects 71.499, 81.109, 89.59, 63.34.1). Born in Lancashire, England, Cole immigrated with his family to Philadelphia in 1818. Over the next several years he labored to teach himself the art of painting as his family moved from Philadelphia to Ohio to western Pennsylvania. In 1825, after additional study in Philadelphia at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Cole settled in New York City. There his early landscape pictures were hailed by fellow artists John Trumbull and Asher B. Durand (see object 71.499). The young artist was suddenly famous.
Cole journeyed to Europe twice, in 1829-32 and again in 1841-42. While in New York between these visits he painted the two ambitious allegorical series for which he is most remembered: The Course of Empirein 1836 and The Voyage of Life, 1840. By the time of his death in 1848 (he died unexpectedly of a lung inflammation, probably pleurisy), he had become New York's leading artist and America's first fully Romantic painter.
The Angel Appearing to the Shepherdsis Cole's largest canvas-it measures more than eight by fifteen feet-and one of his earliest and most ambitious attempts at historical landscape painting. It was produced, without commission, in New York City during the winter of 1833-34, and as Cole later noted in a letter to his friend Francis Alexander, it was completed in the astonishingly brief span of "about two months; I could not afford more [time]." Though Cole executed the canvas rapidly, his initial ideas and designs for it evolved over several years, during his first European trip of 1829-32. He conceived of the subject in 1829, while visiting the British Museum in London, where he saw Rembrandt's 1634 etching of The Angel Appearing to the Shepherds. Impressed by its compositional grandeur and dramatic chiaroscuro effects, he began making preliminary drawings for his own composition while in England. During a visit to Florence in 1831-32, he expanded upon these initial sketches with more drawings and painted figure studies (several of which are today in the Detroit Institute of Arts), and he also produced at least three small preparatory compositional sketches in oil in 1831-33. Two of these are in the Chrysler Museum of Art (see objects 84.32, 86.193).
The painting's shepherds were almost certainly intended as allegorical representations of the three ages of man. They were also meant to signify three successively higher states of spiritual response to the miraculous apparition of the angel, beginning with the stunned incomprehension of the kneeling, nearly prostrate youth and culminating in the quiet understanding and acceptance of the standing elder. Cole derived the semi­reclining pose of the middle shepherd from the antique sculptures of the Ilissusand the Dying Gaul, both of which he had sketched while in Europe. Some scholars have noted that the middle shepherd bears a resemblance to Cole and may be an idealized self-portrait.
The artist exhibited The Angel Appearing to the Shepherdsin the spring of 1834 at the American Academy of the Fine Arts in New York City. It was shown later that year in Albany, New York, and Boston. In 1838 the painting entered the collection of the Boston Atheneum, where it was prominently exhibited until 1889. Unseen and nearly forgotten until its 1976 restoration, it is celebrated today as one of Cole's most ambitious works before The Course of Empire.
JCH
 

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