Cross at Sunset

Cross at Sunset has in common with Expulsion. Moon and Firelight the same religious sentiment that emanates from all Thomas Cole’s paintings. Although the artist always advocated direct contemplation of nature as a manner of endowing landscape painting with spiritual and moral substance and cultivated an allegorical style of landscape painting in keeping with the European romantic tradition, his religious fervour grew stronger as the years passed. In 1844, influenced by the Reverend Louis L. Noble, he was baptized by the Episcopalian Church and thereafter the father of American landscape painting decided to devote his work as a painter to the Church and converted his studio into a workshop and oratory. Immersed in an almost monastic solitude interrupted only when he allowed his wife to read to him, during his final years Cole worked on the series he called The Cross and the World. In this set of works, which he left unfinished, their whereabouts mostly unknown, he aimed to express clearly his belief that landscape painting was capable of conveying the deepest moral feelings. Although Cross at Sunset does not belong to this series, 2 it nevertheless reflects the religious zeal of these late paintings. The composition is dominated by the presence of a large cross and in the distance, on the left, silhouetted against an unfinished landscape, rises the belltower of a monastery. The rays of sun sinking behind the mountains of the horizon are the same ones that appear in another work Cole painted two years earlier, Gothic Ruins and Sunset. Their glow is handled in a symbolic and dramatic way that leaves no doubts as to their relationship with the divine light present at the Creation. Cole’s devotion to the theme of the cross that features in many of his paintings is also reflected in a poem he wrote a year before his death, the final lines of which are closely related to this painting: Brighter and brighter grows the cross The mountain-tops are gold And o’er death’s valley far across The gorgeous light is rolled. Paloma Alarcó