This document provides brief biographies of five American painters: Thomas Cole, Winslow Homer, Jackson Pollock, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Edward Hopper. It describes their backgrounds, artistic styles and contributions. Thomas Cole is identified as the founder of the Hudson River School. Winslow Homer is known for his marine paintings and graphic designs. Jackson Pollock was an influential abstract expressionist. Georgia O'Keeffe painted flowers and landscapes in an abstract style. Edward Hopper created realistic paintings of urban and rural American scenes.

1. American
Painters
-Thomas Cole
- Winslow Homer
- J ackson Pollock
- Geor gia O’Keef ee
- Edwar d Hopper

2. Thomas Cole

3. Thomas Cole (1801 – 1848) was an
English-born American artist. He is
regarded as the founder of the Hudson
River School, an American art
movement that flourished in the mid-
19th century. Cole's Hudson River
School, as well as his own work, was
known for its realistic and detailed
portrayal of American landscape and
wilderness, which feature themes of
romanticism and naturalism.

5.  He was born in Bolton, Lancashire,
England in 1801. In 1818 his family
emigrated to the United States,
settling in Steubenville, Ohio, where
Cole learned the rudiments of his
profession from a wandering portrait
painter named Stein. However, he
had little success painting portraits,
and his interest shifted to
landscape.

7. Painting
Cole was primarily a painter of landscapes,
but he also painted allegorical works. The
most famous of these are the five-part
series, The Course of Empire, which depict
the same landscape over generations—from
a near state of nature to consummation of
empire, and then decline and desolution—
now in the collection of the New York
Historical Society and the four-part The
Voyage of Life.

8. The Course of Empire: Consummation

9. Desolation

10. Personal life
After 1827 Cole maintained a studio at the farm
called Cedar Grove in the town of Catskill, New
York. He painted a significant portion of his work
in this studio. In 1836 he married Maria Bartow
of Catskill, a niece of the owner, and became a
year-round resident. Thomas and Maria had five
children.
 Thomas Cole died at Catskill on February 11,
1848. The fourth highest peak in the Catskills is
named Thomas Cole Mountain in his honor.
Cedar Grove, also known as the Thomas Cole
House, was declared a National Historic Site in
1999 and is now open to the public.

13. Winslow
Homer

14. Winslow Homer (1836 – 1910) was
an American landscape painter and
printmaker, best known for his marine
subjects. He is considered one of the
foremost painters in 19th century America
and a preeminent figure in American art.

16. Born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1836, Homer was the
second of three sons
 His mother was a gifted amateur watercolorist and
Homer’s first teacher, and she and her son had a close
relationship throughout their lives. Homer took on
many of her traits, including her quiet, strong-willed,
sociable nature, her dry sense of humor and her artistic
talent. Homer had a happy childhood, growing up
mostly in then rural Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was
an average student, but his art talent was evident in
his early years.

18. His early works, mostly commercial
engravings of urban and country social
scenes, are characterized by clean outlines,
simplified forms, dramatic contrast of light
and dark, and lively figure groupings —
qualities that remained important throughout
his career. His quick success was mostly due
to this strong understanding of graphic design
and also to the adaptability of his designs to
wood engraving.

23. Paul
Jackson
Pollock

24. Paul Jackson Pollock (January 28, 1912 –
August 11, 1956), known as Jackson Pollock,
was an influential American painter and a
major figure in the abstract expressionist
movement. During his lifetime, Pollock
enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety. He
was regarded as a mostly reclusive artist. He
had a volatile personality, and struggled with
alcoholism for most of his life. In 1945, he
married the artist Lee Krasner, who became
an important influence on his career and on
his legacy.

27. Pollock died at the age of 44 in an alcohol-
related car accident. In December 1956, he
was given a memorial retrospective exhibition
at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in
New York City, and a larger more
comprehensive exhibition there in 1967. More
recently, in 1998 and 1999, his work was
honored with large-scale retrospective
exhibitions at MoMA and at The Tate in
London.
In 2000, Pollock was the subject of an
Academy Award–winning film Pollock directed
by and starring Ed Harris.

30. In November 2006, Pollock's No. 5, 1948
became the world's most expensive painting,
when it was sold privately to an undisclosed
buyer for the sum of $140,000,000. The
previous owner was film and music-producer
David Geffen. It is rumored that the current
owner is a German businessman and art
collector.

32. Georgia O'Keeffe

34. Georgia Totto O'Keeffe (1887 – 1986) was an
American artist. O'Keeffe was a major figure in
American art from the 1920s.
She received widespread recognition for her
technical contributions, as well as for
challenging the boundaries of modern American
artistic style. She is chiefly known for paintings
of flowers, rocks, shells, animal bones, and
landscapes in which she synthesized abstraction
and representation.

35.  Her paintings present crisply contoured forms
that are replete with subtle tonal transitions of
varying colors. She often transformed her subject
matter into powerful abstract images

37.  Importantly, O'Keeffe played a central
role in bringing an American art style to
Europe at a time when the majority of
influence flowed in the opposite direction.
This feat enhanced her art-historical
importance given that she was one of few
women to have gained entry to this level
of professional influence. She found
artistic inspiration, particularly in New
Mexico, where she settled late in life.

40. Edward Hopper

41.  Edward Hopper (1882 – 1967) was a
prominent American realist painter and
printmaker. While most popularly known
for his oil paintings, he was equally
proficient as a watercolorist . In both his
urban and rural scenes, his spare and
finely calculated renderings reflected his
personal vision of modern American life

44.  With his paintings, Hopper paid particular
attention to geometrical design and the
careful placement of human figures in proper
balance with their environment. He was a
slow and methodical artist; as he wrote, “It
takes a long time for an idea to strike. Then I
have to think about it for a long time. I don’t
start painting until I have it all worked out in
my mind. I’m all right when I get to the easel
(мольберт)"

47.  His paintings combine apparently
incompatible qualities. Modern in
their bleakness and simplicity, they
are also full of nostalgia for the
puritan virtues of the American past
- the kind of quirky nineteenth-
century architecture Hopper liked to
paint, for instance, could not have
been more out of fashion than it was
in the mid 1920s, when he first
began to look at it seriously.

49.  In 1929, he was included in the Museum of
Modern Art's second exhibition, Paintings by
Nineteen Living Americans, and in 1930 The
House by the Railroad entered the museum's
permanent collection. In the same year, the
Whitney Museum bought Hopper's Early
Sunday Morning it's most expensive purchase
up to that time. In 1933 Hopper was given a
retrospective exhibition at the Museum of
Modern Art. This was followed, in 1950, by a
fuller retrospective show at the Whitney.