Description
This beautiful paperweight features Landscape Scene from “The Last of the Mohicans” by Thomas Cole.
Thomas Cole is one of the founders of the Hudson River School of landscape art, and his trips to Lake George, in northeast New York State, inspired him to both paint and write poetry about the site. Cole was a friend of James Fenimore Cooper and was particularly influenced by Cooper’s writing and his painterly depictions of Lake George as a “Holy Lake.” When Cole was commissioned by the prominent collector, Robert Gilmor, Jr. to paint “some known subject from Cooper’s novels to enliven the landscape,” he chose this scene from Chapter Twelve of The Last of the Mohicans. Painted less than a year after the novel’s publication, Cole’s work marks the first in a long line of illustrations based upon Cooper’s famous novel set at Lake George. This particular landscape created by Cole does not faithfully depict the contours of Lake George, but rather incorporates various sketches that Cole had made from trips in New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York.
