Though Thomas Cole was born in England in 1801 and lived there through out his childhood, Cole is largely considered one of the most important founders of the Hudson River School movement in American art. He is also considered a Romantic landscape painter. During his life in England he attended school and then became an assistant to an engraver in Liverpool until he relocated to the United States in 1818. It is likely that much of the focus on miniscule details in the paintings of Thomas Cole is a remnant of his early training in the highly detailed work of engraving. Cole did not receive training in the fine art of painting until he was living in the United States and began to paint professionally in the year of 1821. After 1825 he would became able to support himself thanks to the rising sales of Thomas Cole artwork, often by fellow artists who admired his work. Later, in 1826, he would become one of the founding members of the National Academy of Design and would die an early death in 1848, but not before passing on some of his techniques to two students who would also become prominent painters: Frederic Church and Benjamin McConkey. Prior to the developments of the oil paintings of Thomas Cole, American painters had been relegated to simply portrait artists or other types of figure painting in order to gain commissions and attention in the existing art world. However, Thomas Cole paintings breathed life into the American art scene and allowed landscape painting to become a prestigious subject matter for high quality painting in the United States. The characteristics of oil paintings of Thomas Cole which ushered in the new attention to landscape paintings were the levels of detail seemed to reflect the ideal of wilderness that was becoming popular in the middle of the nineteenth century thanks to literary works such as James Fenimore Cooper’s novels. Some of Thomas Cole’s most accomplished paintings were historical landscapes, also known as religious allegories, which were an effort upon his part to allow critics to see that landscapes were valuable contributions to the world of art. Thomas Cole became a renowned painter who was often based out of Cedar Grove, a farm where he held a studio near Catskill, New York. The paintings of Thomas Cole that are most frequently described as the most important of his career are diverse in the representations of their subjects, but all hold common strands of Cole’s technique and philosophy regarding the importance of landscape painting. Some of his most famous works are: The Voyage of Life Series (including Childhood, Youth, Man Hood, and Old Age), The Garden of Eden, Romantic Landscape with Ruined Tower, Hunter’s Return, Notch of the White Mountains, River in the Catskills, Daniel Boone Sitting at the Door of His Cabin on the Great Osage Lake Kentucky, Evening in Arcady, L’Allegro, and The Course of Empire Series. These paintings clearly display the majestic detail of landscape that allow Thomas Cole to remain the father of the Hudson River School movement.