gether a kit of painting materials, and started to tramp about the
country as a portraitist. He found the woods full of them, and
competition so fierce that he was unable to make a living; but,
determining to be an artist at any cost, he returned to Philadelphia and
passed a fearful winter there, living on bread and water, half frozen by
the cold, with only a cloth table-cover for overcoat and bed, and
suffering tortures from inflammatory rheumatism. A second trying winter
followed, but in the spring of 1825 he removed to New York, and his
privations were at an end.

For in those years of suffering he had developed a delicate art as a
landscapist, and he found a ready sale for his pictures, at first at low
prices, it is true; but his fame spread rapidly, and he was able, in
1829, to go abroad and spend three years in Italy and England. He lived
only to the age of forty-seven, his last years being passed principally
in his studio in the Catskills, where some of his most famous pictures
were painted.

Cole was widely known for many years for the various series of moral and
didactic pictures which he was fond of painting. Perhaps the most famous
of these was his "Voyage of Life," showing infancy, youth, manhood, and
old age floating down the stream of time. The taste of the period
approved them, and they were especially popular for schoolrooms,
lecture-halls and other places where youth would have a chance to gaze
upon and gather edification from them. It has since come to be
recognized that the proper way to tell a story is by words and not by
pictures, and "The Voyage of Life," and "Course of Empire," and "The
Cross and the World" have, for the most part, been relegated to the
attic.

Durand and Cole were the founders of the famous Hudson River, or White
Mountain school, which loomed so large in American art half a century
ago. Its members, now rather regarded in the light of primitives,
gloried in the views of the Hudson, especially as seen from the
Catskills, and journeyed into the wilds of the Rockies and the
Yellowstone in search of sublime subjects--too sublime to be transferred
to canvas. They loved nature--loved to copy her minutely and literally,
loved to live in her hills and woods. Some of them came afterwards to
see that, after all, this was not art, or only one of her lower
forms--that to achieve a great result, a picture must express an idea.

Cole had a pupil and disciple, who did some admirable work, i