Thomas Cole’s New Studio by Julie Levin Caro. Drawing from his experiences as a landscape painter and an artist-tourist in Italy as well as his knowledge of picturesque landscape theory, Thomas Cole actively shaped the built environment of his home and studio at Cedar Grove during the 1830s and 1840s. Julie Levin Caro, art history professor at Warren Wilson College, Asheville, North Carolina, offers a new perspective on Thomas Cole’s artistic identity by describing his design and siting of a rustic Italianate cottage studio as a means of enacting and immortalizing his identity as an artist-gentleman, a political conservative and an American.