Timothy Cole

Timothy Cole (1852 – 17 May, 1931) was an American wood engraver.

Born in London, England, his family emigrated 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 moved to New York City, finding work on the Century (then Scribners) magazine. Cole was associated with the magazine for 40 years as a pioneer craftsman of wood engraving.

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, Spanish, Flemish and English pictures were published in book form with appreciative notes by the engraver himself. Old Dutch and Flemish Masters was one of the books that Cole had contributed his wood engravings.

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. In 1906 he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate Academician, and became a full Academician in 1908.

His son, Alphaeus Philemon Cole, was a noted portraitist who is also today recognized for having lived to be the oldest verified man in the world.

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