author
Louis Legrand Noble
1813–1882
Best known as the Episcopal clergyman who wrote an early, influential life of painter Thomas Cole, this 19th-century author moved easily between religion, poetry, travel writing, and art criticism. His books bring together a pastor’s voice and a traveler’s eye, especially in his vivid account of a northern voyage among icebergs.
1 Audiobook
After Icebergs with a Painter A Summer Voyage to Labrador and Around Newfoundland.
by Louis Legrand Noble
About the author
Born in New York in 1813, Louis Legrand Noble was an Episcopal minister as well as a writer. Sources available online describe him as a graduate of Bristol College and the General Theological Seminary in New York, after which he was ordained in the early 1840s and served in a number of church posts.
He is most closely linked with the Hudson River School through his friendship with Thomas Cole. Noble wrote The Course of Empire, Voyage of Life, and Other Pictures of Thomas Cole in 1853, later issued as The Life and Works of Thomas Cole, helping preserve Cole’s reputation for later readers.
Noble also wrote poetry and travel narrative. His best-known later book, After Icebergs with a Painter (1861), grew out of a voyage to Labrador and Newfoundland with artist Frederic Edwin Church, and it remains a lively blend of observation, reflection, and enthusiasm for the natural world. A few reference sources disagree on details of his death and even the exact year of his birth, so the dates usually given for him are 1813–1882.