Italian Coast Scene with Ruined Tower

Thomas Cole

National Gallery of Art

We look across a rocky, grass-covered promontory at a crumbling, round brick tower overlooking topaz-blue water in this horizontal landscape painting. Golden sunlight warms the face of the tower and throws the steep outcropping below into deep shadow. To the right of center, the brown stone tower is partially overgrown with climbing ivy and other vegetation. About two dozen white sheep and several sienna-brown goats lie or stand scattered around the narrow ring of grass that surrounds the tower. A young man with pale skin and dark hair, wearing a ginger-brown toga, watches over the six sheep and two goats on the side of the tower closest to us. The shepherd’s staff has a hooked end, and he sits facing away from us on parchment-white stones that may be carved fragments of a large building. The promontory holding the tower has steep, vertical sides that dip into shadow, and lower hills fill the bottom left corner of the painting. Three more rocky outcroppings jut up in the smooth waters of the ocean in the distance, and a solitary ship, tiny in scale, sails near the middle formation. The still surface of the water reflects the towering, puffy white and lavender-purple clouds that line the horizon, which comes almost halfway up the canvas. A white disk, presumably the moon, hangs low near the horizon to our left. A few thin, lilac-purple clouds stretch across the sky closer to the top edge of the painting. The artist signed the work as if he had written his name on the face of a rock near the lower right corner, so the last letter is partially obscured by another rock: “T.Cole.”