Thomas Cole Drawing at Princeton & Burchfield Drawings in Buffalo
- Last weekend I did some time traveling. Or so it seemed. I took a trip with the Baltimore Museum of Art 's Prints, Drawings and Photographs Society to the Princeton University Art Museum . Upon entering the Museum's galleries I fell almost immediately into an unassuming drawing by one of the great old masters of American painting, Thomas Cole (1801-1848), the founder of the Hudson River School of landscape painters. Titled simply Rocks, Trees, and Dog, Cole made it out probably while out on one of his nature hikes in 1846, just two years before his untimely death. As I looked at it I had the sensation that old as it was, it could have been drawn by Charles Burchfield (Am. 1893- 1967) whose drawings I've been studying the last couple of years in the Archives at the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, NY. Modest as Cole's drawing is in scale, it has a lot to say-playing eloquently with themes of solidity and permanence v.s. forms that are deli