During his short life Thomas Cole became something of a national culture hero: a young one for a young nation. He was esteemed as the founder of national landscape painting in the U.S. - the so-called Hudson River

School. At his death, the wild places of the Catskills mourned him. His death, opined a newspaper editorial, was "a public and national calamity." Even allowing for the high rhetorical tint required of such stories 150 years ago, it`s hard to think of another American artist whose death would inspire such sentiments.