Thomas Cole hikes west high up into the eastern Catskill Mountains of New York State to paint the first landscapes of the area.

He had taken a steamship up the Hudson in the autumn of 1825, the same year the Erie Canal opened, stopping first at West Point, then at Catskill landing.

The first review of his work appears in the New York Evening Post on November 22, 1825.

At this time, only the English native Cole, born in a landscape where autumnal tints were of browns and yellows, finds the brilliant autumn hues of the area to be inspirational.

English-born American artist Thomas Cole details nature’s overwhelming elemental forces in his wild, Bible-inspired 1829 landscape The Subsiding Waters of the Deluge.

The artist Thomas Cole is generally acknowledged as the founder of the Hudson River School, an art movement by a group of landscape painters that focuses on the beauty of natural scenes drawn from locations in Eastern North America and South America.

Cole's close friend, Asher Durand, becomes a prominent figure in the school as well.

An important part of the popularity of the Hudson River School is its celebration of its themes of nationalism, nature, and property.

However, adherents of the movement are also suspicious (or perhaps ambivalent) of the economic and technological development of the age.

Davis's North Carolina's statehouse (1833 -40, with local architect David Paton), ...

...the Illinois State Capitol, often attributed entirely to the Springfield, Illinois architect John Rague, who was at work on the Iowa State Capitol at the same time, and ...

...the committee responsible for commissioning a design for the Ohio Statehouse asks Davis's advice in 1839.

The resulting capitol in Columbus, Ohio, often attributed to the Hudson River Valley painter Thomas Cole consulting with Davis and Ithiel Town, has a stark Greek Doric colonnade across a recessed entrance, flanked by recessed window bays that continue the rhythm of the central portico, all under a unique drum capped by a low saucer dome. (Davis will continue in partnership with Town until shortly before Town's death in 1844.)

Thomas Cole, best known for his work as an American landscape artist, has spent the years 1829 to 1832 and 1841 to 1842 abroad, mainly in England and Italy.

Cole has also produced thousands of sketches of varying subject matter, of which over twenty-five hundred of these sketches can be seen today at The Detroit Institute of Arts.

In 1842, Cole had embarked on a Grand Tour of Europe in an effort to study in the style of the Old Masters and to paint its scenery.

Most striking to Cole is Europe's tallest active volcano, Mount Etna. (Regarding the title: "Etna" is the more common spelling in the present day, but "Aetna" was a common nineteenth-century variant.)

Cole is so moved by the volcano's beauty that he produces several sketches and at least six paintings of it.

The most famous of these works is A View from Mount Etna from Taormina.

Cole also produced a highly detailed sketch of it, entitled View of Mount Etna, which shows a panoramic view of the volcano with the crumbling walls of the ancient Greek theater of Taormina on the far right.