View of Florence (1837): Art, History and Details

View of Florence (1837) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Thomas Cole (American, born England,1801–1848).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Cole visited Italy in 1831 and made a small pencil sketch of this vista of Florence shortly before sunset. In his New York studio six years later, he transformed the drawing into this large oil painting, adding picturesque humans and goats to the foreground. Exhibiting View of Florence alongside a painting of the Catskill Mountains in New York in 1837, Cole set out to prove that he had mastered the very different landscapes of the Old and New Worlds.

Object facts

• Title: View of Florence
• Date: 1837
• Creator attribution: Thomas Cole (American, born England,1801–1848)
• Culture: America
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 125.4 x 186.7 x 9.2 cm (49 3/8 x 73 1/2 x 3 5/8 in.); Unframed: 99.5 x 160.4 cm (39 3/16 x 63 1/8 in.)
• Collection: American - Painting
• Department: American Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1961.39

A detail from the museum

Novelist Henry James grew up with this painting and described its foreground monk as his “constant friend.”

Collection credit

Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Victor Spark, letter to Henry S. Francis, June 10, 1960, in CMA curatorial file.
• David Steinberg, letter to Alfred Habegger, May 16, 1994, in CMA curatorial file.
• Victor D. Spark Papers, Series 4.2, Other Financial Records, 1930-1981, Box 17, Folder 6, Stock Books, 1958-1960, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.