Right now we are in the narrow crack between "Consummation" and "Destruction"
Always liked Cole and the Hudson River School.
When I was a child my mother would go to the National Gallery of Art at least once a week, always on a weekday when it wasn’t crowded. Some of my earliest memories are wandering through its galleries, and particularly the small octagonal room where the four panels of Cole’s “The Voyage of Life” are hung. Today, I might favor Bierstadt over Cole, but those four paintings have retained a significant place in my imagination as the stages of my own life have passed.
That is a wonderful series. I could look at those paintings for hours on end.
Raised my children visiting the Nat Gallery, and from when my son was little he has been fanatic about Cole’s Voyage of Life. He’s in his 20s now, and every time we visit, he shows me something new in or about them — so intricate, so carefully planned, these paintings are amazing.