Thomas Cole was born in 1801 in Lancashire, England, and died in 1848 in Catskill, New York, where he’d lived since 1825. It is Cole who founded the Hudson River School of art, a movement that glorified the pristine vistas of the Hudson River Valley, finding spirituality in vast cloud and rock formations, and god in its green swaths of forest and golden sun. The art of this movement is shot through with the Transcendentalist divine (Henry David Thoreau: “Low-anchored cloud, / Newfoundland air, / Fountain-head and source of rivers …”). Cole let his subject determine the size of his canvases, and the panoramic landscapes are very large, with wind, storm, and cloud devouring the luminous land below. His influence was enormous, and a mountain in the Catskills is named for him. This inaugural exhibition in the new Richard Sharp Gallery presents 16 paintings by Cole and one by his splendid student Frederic Church (born 200 years ago this year). —Laura Jacobs