1837
unspecified
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
View of Florence is a 1837 unspecified by Thomas Cole, a American Impressionism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a golden city at dusk—Florence’s domes and towers glow under a soft pink sky. Tiny people and goats wander the hills in front. Cole painted this from a sketch he made years earlier in Italy. He added the goats and figures later, in his New York studio, to make the scene feel lived-in. He wanted to show he could paint both European and American landscapes well. Look up *The Cleveland Museum of Art* to see more of his work.
Cole visited Italy in 1831 and made a small pencil sketch of this vista of Florence shortly before sunset. In his New York studio six years later, he transformed the drawing into this large oil painting, adding picturesque humans and goats to the foreground. Exhibiting View of Florence alongside a painting of the Catskill Mountains in New York in 1837, Cole set out to prove that he had mastered the very different landscapes of the Old and New Worlds.
Novelist Henry James grew up with this painting and described its foreground monk as his “constant friend.”
Read the full account in the museum source.
Thomas Cole (February 1, 1801 – February 11, 1848) was an Anglo-American artist who founded the Hudson River School art movement.
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