Mount Etna From Taormina, Sicily, 1843 Thomas Cole (1801-1848)

We create our paintings with museum quality and covering the highest academic standards. Once we get your order, it will be entirely hand-painted with oil on canvas. All the materials we use are the highest level, being totally artist graded painting materials and linen canvas.

We will add 1.6" (4 cm) additional blank canvas all over the painting for stretching.

High quality and detailing in every inch are time consuming. The reproduction of Thomas Cole also needs time to dry in order to be completely ready for shipping, as this is crucial to not be damaged during transportation.
Based on the size, level of detail and complexity we need 8-9 weeks to complete the process.

In case the delivery date needs to be extended in time, or we are overloaded with requests, there will be an email sent to you sharing the new timelines of production and delivery.

TOPofART wants to remind you to keep patient, in order to get you the highest quality, being our mission to fulfill your expectations.

We not stretch and frame our oil paintings due to several reasons:
Painting reproduction is a high quality expensive product, which we cannot risk to damage by sending it being stretched.
Also, there are postal restrictions, regarding the size of the shipment.
Additionally, due to the dimensions of the stretched canvas, the shipment price may exceed the price of the product itself.

You can stretch and frame your painting in your local frame-shop.

Once the painting Mount Etna From Taormina, Sicily is ready and dry, it will be shipped to your delivery address. The canvas will be rolled-up in a secure postal tube.

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The paintings we create are only of museum quality. Our academy graduated artists will never allow a compromise in the quality and detail of the ordered painting. TOPofART do not work, and will never allow ourselves to work with low quality studios from the Far East. We are based in Europe, and quality is our highest priority.

The eye first settles on the broken proscenium of Taormina’s ancient theatre, its arches and columns mottled with lichen, the ochre masonry softened by accumulated centuries. Beyond this foreground of cultural debris, the land unfurls in terraces of olive, cypress and volcanic scree, descending to a turquoise Ionian Sea that flickers at the horizon. Above all, Etna rises, a crystalline wedge of snow-bound slopes and tenuous vapour, its scale measuring human enterprise against geological immensity.

Cole’s chromatic orchestration is deliberate and lyrical. Warm russets and mossy browns anchor the ruins, while the middle distance shifts to sage and dusty rose, enveloped in a silvery atmospheric haze. The volcano, cloaked in cool whites tinged with the faintest lavender, catches the late sun so that the peak glows like marble lit from within. The dialogue between earth-tethered warmth and aerial coolness carries emotional weight: civilisation appears transient, whereas nature, even volatile nature, suggests endurance.

Working in oil on a monumental canvas, the artist modulates his brushwork with precision. In the masonry one senses the drag of a loaded bristle, registering granular texture; in the distant valleys he employs feathered scumbles to suggest humid light; the snowfields are rendered in thin, smooth layers that permit the under-painting to lend translucence. Such varied handling underscores Cole’s conviction that technique should serve meaning rather than virtuosity.

Compositionally, the painting is a carefully balanced procession from ruin to peak. The curved wall of the theatre forms a visual proscenium through which the terrain is staged, its arch echoing in the distant fumarole. Diagonal ridges guide the gaze toward the summit, while a solitary figure, almost lost among the stones, provides a human pivot. The result is an orchestrated pilgrimage for the eye, migrating from the tangible relics of empire to the sublime prospect of untamed forces.

Executed in 1843, shortly after Cole’s Sicilian tour, the picture is steeped in the Romantic meditation on history’s passage. The artist, leader of the emerging Hudson River School, here confronts European antiquity rather than American wilderness, yet the moral undertone is familiar: societies rise and crumble, but the landscape abides. Etna, simultaneously destructive and regenerative, becomes a secular memento mori, reformulating the “Course of Empire” theme denied him at the New-York exhibition.

What endures, then, is a subtle elegy rather than a lament. Cole’s grand scale invites the viewer into a measured contemplation of time—architectural, human, geological—in which beauty is inseparable from mutability.