to the financial disappointment of many, conferred a great benefit upon the metropolis by originating the scheme for the erection of the Royal Albert Hall. He was active in founding the national training schools for cookery and music, the latter the germ of the Royal College of Music. He edited the works of his benefactor Peacock; and was in his younger days largely connected with the press, and the author of many useful topographical handbooks published under the pseudonym of “Felix Summerly.” He died on the 18th of April 1882.
COLE, THOMAS (1801–1848), American landscape painter,
was born at Bolton-le-Moors, England, on the 1st of February
1801. In 1819 the family emigrated to America, settling first in
Philadelphia and then at Steubenville, Ohio, where Cole learned
the rudiments of his profession from a wandering portrait painter
named Stein. He went about the country painting portraits,
but with little financial success. Removing to New York (1825),
he displayed some landscapes in the window of an eating-house,
where they attracted the attention of the painter Colonel
Trumbull, who sought him out, bought one of his canvases, and
found him patrons. From this time Cole was prosperous. He is
best remembered by a series of pictures consisting of four canvases
representing “The Voyage of Life,” and another series of five
canvases representing “The Course of Empire,” the latter now
in the gallery of the New York Historical Society. They were
allegories, in the taste of the day, and became exceedingly popular,
being reproduced in engravings with great success. The work,
however, was meretricious, the sentiment false, artificial and
conventional, and the artist’s genuine fame must rest on his
landscapes, which, though thin in the painting, hard in the
handling, and not infrequently painful in detail, were at least
earnest endeavours to portray the world out of doors as it
appeared to the painter; their failings were the result of Cole’s
environment and training. He had an influence on his time and
his fellows which was considerable, and with Durand he may be
said to have founded the early school of American landscape
painters. Cole spent the years 1829–1832 and 1841–1842 abroad,
mainly in Italy, and at Florence lived with the sculptor
Greenough. After 1827 he had a studio in the Catskills which
furnished the subjects of some of his canvases, and he died at
Catskill, New York, on the 11th of February 1848. His pictures
are in many public and private collections. His “Expulsion from Eden” is in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
COLE, TIMOTHY (1852–), American wood engraver, was born in London, England, in 1852, his family emigrating to the
United States in 1858. He established himself in Chicago, where
in the great fire of 1871 he lost everything he possessed. In 1875
he removed to New York, finding work on the Century (then
Scribner’s) magazine. He immediately attracted attention by
his unusual facility and his sympathetic interpretation of illustrations
and pictures, and his publishers sent him abroad in 1883 to
engrave a set of blocks after the old masters in the European
galleries. These achieved for him a brilliant success. His reproductions
of Italian, Dutch, Flemish and English pictures were
published in book form with appreciative notes by the engraver
himself. Though the advent of new mechanical processes had
rendered wood engraving almost a lost art and left practically
no demand for the work of such craftsmen, Mr Cole was thus
enabled to continue his work, and became one of the foremost
contemporary masters of wood engraving. He received a medal of the first class at the Paris Exhibition of 1900, and the only grand prize given for wood engraving at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition at St Louis, Missouri, in 1904.
COLE, VICAT (1833–1893), English painter, born at Portsmouth on the 17th of April 1833, was the son of the landscape
painter, George Cole, and in his practice followed his father’s lead with marked success. He exhibited at the British Institution at the age of nineteen, and was first represented at the Royal
Academy in 1853. His election as an associate of this institution
took place in 1870, and he became an Academician ten years later.
He died in London on the 6th of April 1893. The wide popularity
of his work was due partly to the simple directness of his technical
method, and partly to his habitual choice of attractive material.
Most of his subjects were found in the counties of Surrey and
Sussex, and along the banks of the Thames. One of his largest
pictures, “The Pool of London,” was bought by the Chantrey
Fund Trustees in 1888, and is now in the Tate Gallery.
See Robert Chignell, The Life and Paintings of Vicat Cole, R.A. (London, 1899).
COLEBROOKE, HENRY THOMAS (1765–1837), English Orientalist, the third son of Sir George Colebrooke, 2nd baronet, was born in London on the 15th of June 1765. He was educated
at home; and when only fifteen he had made considerable
attainments in classics and mathematics. From the age of
twelve to sixteen he resided in France, and in 1782 was appointed
to a writership in India. About a year after his arrival there he
was placed in the board of accounts in Calcutta; and three years
later he was removed to a situation in the revenue department
at Tirhut. In 1789 he was removed to Purneah, where he investigated
the resources of that part of the country, and published his
Remarks on the Husbandry and Commerce of Bengal, privately
printed in 1795, in which he advocated free trade between Great
Britain and India. After eleven years’ residence in India,
Colebrooke began the study of Sanskrit; and to him was confided
the translation of the great Digest of Hindu Laws, which had been
left unfinished by Sir William Jones. He translated the two
treatises Mitacshara and Dayabhaga under the title Law of Inheritance.
He was sent to Nagpur in 1799 on a special mission,
and on his return was made a judge of the new court of appeal,
over which he afterwards presided. In 1805 Lord Wellesley
appointed him professor of Hindu Law and Sanskrit at the college
of Fort William. During his residence at Calcutta he wrote his
Sanskrit Grammar (1805), some papers on the religious ceremonies
of the Hindus, and his Essay on the Vedas (1805), for a long time
the standard work on the subject. He became member of council
in 1807 and returned to England seven years later. He died on
the 18th of March 1837. He was a director of the Asiatic Society, and many of the most valuable papers in the society’s Transactions were communicated by him.
His life was written by his son, Sir T. E. Colebrooke, in 1873.
COLEMANITE, a hydrous calcium borate, Ca2B6O11 + 5H2O,
found in California as brilliant monoclinic crystals. It contains
50.9% of boron trioxide, and is an important source of commercial
borates and boracic acid. Beautifully developed
crystals, up to 2 or 3 in. in length, encrust cavities in compact,
white colemanite; they are colourless and transparent, and
the brilliant lustre of their faces is vitreous to adamantine in
character. There is a perfect cleavage parallel to the plane of
symmetry of the crystals. Hardness 4-412; specific gravity
2.42. The mineral was first discovered in 1882 in Death Valley,
Inyo county, California, and in the following year it was found
in greater abundance near Daggett in San Bernardino county,
forming with other borates and borosilicates a bed in sedimentary
strata of sandstones and clays; in more recent years
very large masses have been found and worked in these localities,
and also in Los Angeles county (see Special Report, 1905, of
U.S. Census Bureau on Mines and Quarries; and Mineral Resources of the U.S., 1907).
Priceite and pandermite are hydrous calcium borates with very nearly the same composition as colemanite, and they may really be only impure forms of this species. They are massive white minerals, the former friable and chalk-like, and the latter firm and compact in texture. Priceite occurs near Chetco in Curry county, Oregon, where it forms layers between a bed of slate and one of tough blue steatite; embedded in the steatite are rounded masses of priceite varying in size from that of a pea to masses weighing 200 ℔. Pandermite comes from Asia Minor, and is shipped from the port of Panderma on the Sea of Marmora: it occurs as large nodules, up to a ton in weight, beneath a thick bed of gypsum.
Another borate of commercial importance found abundantly in the Californian deposits is ulexite, also known as boronatrocalcite or “cotton-ball,” a hydrous calcium and sodium borate, CaNaB5O9 + 8H2O, which forms rounded masses consisting of a loose aggregate of fine fibres. It is the principal species in the borate deposits in the Atacama region of South America. (L. J. S.)
