Special Features - Looking & Seeing
Thomas Cole and Flood Geology
Click the Play button to see this brief presentation by Art Historian Rebecca Bedell about Thomas Cole's painting, The Subsiding of the Waters of the Deluge.
Credits and Sources
Thomas Cole, Subsiding of the Waters of the Deluge, 1829.
Oil on canvas, 36 x 48 in. (91.4 x 121.9 cm).
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC. Gift of Mrs. Katie Dean in memory of Minnibel S. and James Wallace Dean.
Thomas Seir Cummings, Portrait of Thomas Cole, ca. 1826-1828.
Albany Institute of History and Art
Samuel Morse, Portrait of Benjamin Silliman, Jr., 1825.
Yale University Art Gallery.
“The Asiatic Deluge” from Louis Figuier’s The World Before the Deluge (English trans. 1865)
Edward Hill, Franconia Notch, White Mountains, 1887.
New Hampshire Historical Society.
Fossil found by Pliny Moody in 1802, Beneski Museum of Natural History, Amherst College. Photo by Penny Leveritt
The “Sarcophagus” on the Pumpelly Trail. Photo by Patrick Hummel. Image courtesy New Hampshire State Parks
Content by Rebecca Bedell, Associate Professor of Art, Wellesley College, with help from Juliet Jacobson. Read by Juliet Jacobson.