None know how often the hand of God is seen in a wilderness but them that rove it for a man's life.

Thomas Cole (February 1 1801 – February 11 1848) was an American artist. Durand and Frederic Edwin Church who studied with Cole from 1844 to 1846. 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 desolation—now in the collection of the New York Historical Society and the four-part The Voyage of Life.

Thomas Cole (February 1 1801 – February 11 1848) was an American artist. He is regarded as the founder of the Hudson River School an American art movement that flouriThomas Coled in the mid-19th century.