The Musée du Louvre, the High Museum of Art (Atlanta), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Arkansas), and the Terra Foundation for American Art have announced the launch of a four-year collaboration devoted to American art. The first presentation of the “New Frontier” partnership is centered on Thomas Cole (1801–1848) and the rise of American landscape painting.
 
In 1975 the Louvre acquired The Cross in the Wilderness, the Louvre’s only painting by Thomas Cole, which represents the culmination of the artist’s reflection, initiated in 1825, on the representation of a certain type of American landscape, both untouched and grandiose. Inspired by the sentiments expressed in contemporary American literature by writers such as James Fenimore Cooper and William Cullen Bryant, the works of Cole and those of his compatriot Asher B. Durand initiated a particularly new and fertile genre in the young school of American painting. In addition to the painting from the Louvre, five works drawn from the collections of the partner institutions have been selected for the inaugural presentation. These include the Landscape with Figures: A Scene from “The Last of the Mohicans” (Terra Foundation for American Art) painted by Cole in 1826 and considered one of the artist’s first masterpieces.

Organized by:
Guillaume Faroult, curator in the Department of Paintings, Musée du Louvre