Thomas Cole

Henry Kirke Brown

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Thomas Cole (1801–1848) enjoyed the patronage of influential New Yorkers, including the merchant Jonathan Sturges, who owned this bust by 1850. After the landscape painter’s untimely death, the city’s cultural elite moved quickly to eulogize him, and this portrait was probably modeled as part of that effort—not during Cole’s lifetime. The work partakes of Brown’s customary blending of a highly realistic likeness with a conventional classicizing drape. The striking resemblance to a daguerreotype of Cole by Mathew B. Brady, then on view at the photographer’s Broadway gallery, may be more than a coincidence, for Brown would have looked to lifetime likenesses of Cole as an aid in modeling his own.

The American Wing

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The American Wing's ever-evolving collection comprises some 20,000 works of art by African American, Euro American, Latin American, and Native American men and women. Ranging from the colonial to early-modern periods, the holdings include painting, sculpture, works on paper, and decorative arts—including furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, silver, metalwork, jewelry, basketry, quill and bead embroidery—as well as historical interiors and architectural fragments.

Metropolitan Museum of Art