Object Information

Thomas Cole
American, 1801-1848

Distant View of Niagara Falls, 1830

Oil on panel
47.9 x 60.6 cm (18 7/8 x 23 7/8 in.)
Signed, lower right: "Thomas Cole / 1830"
Friends of American Art Collection, 1946.396

Exhibition, Publication and Ownership Histories

Exhibition History

Milwaukee Art Institute, Nineteenth Century American Masters, Feb. 20-Mar. 28, 1948, cat. 12.

Hartford, Conn., Wadsworth Atheneum, Thomas Cole 1801-1848: One Hundred Years Later, Nov. 12, 1948-Jan. 2, 1949, cat. 155 ,as Niagara Falls; traveled to New York City, Whitney Museum of American Art, Jan. 8-30, 1949.

Arts Club of Chicago, The American Landscape, Nov. 14-Dec. 29, 1973, cat. 4.

Washington, D.C., Corcoran Gallery of Art, Niagara: Two Centuries of Changing Attitudes, 1697-1901, Sept. 21-Nov. 24, 1985; traveled to Buffalo, Knox Art Gallery, July 13-Sept. 1, 1985; Corcoran Gallery of Art, New-York Historical Society, Jan. 22-Apr. 27, 1986.

Publication History

Julia D. Sophronia Snow, “Delineators of the Adams-Jackson American Views,” Antiques (Nov. 1936), pp. 214-19.

Louis Legrand Noble, The Life and Works of Thomas Cole (Belknap Press, 1964).

Howard S. Merritt, “A Wild Scene, Genesis of a Painting: Appendix I: Correspondence between Thomas Cole and Robert Gilmor, Jr.” Baltimore Museum of Art Annual 2 (1967), pp. 41-81.

Henry H. Glassie, “Thomas Cole and Niagara Falls,” New-York Historical Quarterly, 58, 2 (Apr. 1974), pp. 89-111.

“Reevaluation of a Thomas Cole Painting,” Museum Studies 8 (1973), pp. 96-108.

Matthew Baigell, Thomas Cole (Watson-Guptill Publications, 1981).

J. Bard McNulty, ed., The Correspondence of Thomas Cole and Daniel Wadsworth (Connecticut Historical Society, 1983).

Elizabeth McKinsey, Niagara Falls: Icon of the American Sublime (Cambridge University Press, 1985).

Ellwood Parry III, The Art of Thomas Cole: Ambition and Imagination (University of Delaware Press, 1988).

Earl A. Powell, Thomas Cole (Harry N. Abrams Publishers, 1990).

Angela Miller, The Empire of the Eye (Cornell University Press, 1993).

Thomas Cole: Drawn to Nature, exh. cat., (Albany Institute of History and Art, 1993).

William H. Truettner and Alan Wallach, eds., Thomas Cole: Landscape into History (National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1994), ill.

Judith A. Barter et al., American Arts at The Art Institute of Chicago: From Colonial Times to World War I (Art Institute of Chicago, 1998).

Ownership History

Frank Sabin, London, by 1936; M. Knoedler, London, 1937; Mrs. Edith Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, London, by 1946; The Art Institute of Chicago, 1946.