Painting the “Baronial Castle”: Thomas Cole at Featherston Park

Thomas Cole’s paintings of the country house of the antebellum agriculturalist and geologist George William Featherstonhaugh have fallen into undeserved obscurity. The mere fact that Cole made “house portraits” goes against received wisdom about his rejection of topographic view painting in favor of a rigorously intellectual and poetic art of landscape. Moreover, the reception history of the three surviving canvases in this series has been clouded by the political disputes period commentators had with the patron. Reexamining existing sources alongside new archival discoveries, William L. Coleman interprets the Featherston Park paintings as early evidence of Cole’s abiding concern with the inhabited landscape across media.