Thomas Cole, An Evening in Arcadia

Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut

Date: 1843
Technique: Oil on canvas

Thomas Cole, Brock's Monument

Private collection

Date: Unknown
Technique: Oil on canvas, 113.03 x 75.57 cm

Thomas Cole, Landscape (Moonlight)

New-York Historical Society

Date: c. 1833-34
Technique: Oil on canvas, 31 ½ x 24 ½ in.

Thomas Cole, The Past

Mead Art Museum, Amherst College

Date: 1838
Technique: Oil on canvas, 102.9 × 156.2 cm

Thomas Cole, The Present

Mead Art Museum, Amherst College

Date: 1838
Technique: Oil on canvas, 103.5 × 156.5 cm

Thomas Cole, Architect’s Dream

Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio

Date: 1840
Technique: Oil on canvas, 1347 x 2136 mm

Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: Destruction

New-York Historical Society

Date: 1836
Technique: Oil on canvas, 100.33 x 161.29 cm

The Course of Empire is a five-part series of paintings created by Thomas Cole in the years 1833–36. It is notable in part for reflecting popular American sentiments of the times, when many saw pastoralism as the ideal phase of human civilization, fearing that empire would lead to gluttony and inevitable decay. The theme of cycles is also one that Cole returned to frequently, such as in his The Voyage of Life series.

The series was acquired by The New-York Historical Society in 1858 as a gift of the New-York Gallery of Fine Arts, and comprises the following works: The Course of Empire – The Savage State; The Course of Empire – The Arcadian or Pastoral State; The Course of Empire – The Consummation of Empire; The Course of Empire – Destruction; and The Course of Empire – Desolation.

The series of paintings depicts the growth and fall of an imaginary city, situated on the lower end of a river valley, near its meeting with a bay of the sea. The valley is distinctly identifiable in each of the paintings, in part because of an unusual landmark: a large boulder is precariously situated atop a crag overlooking the valley. Some critics believe this is meant to contrast the immutability of the earth with the transience of man.

A direct source of literary inspiration for The Course of Empire paintings is Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812–18).

The fourth painting, Destruction, has almost the same perspective as the third, though the artist has stepped back a bit to allow a wider scene of the action, and moved almost to the center of the river. The action is the sack and destruction of the city, in the course of a tempest seen in the distance. It seems that a fleet of enemy warriors has overthrown the city's defenses, sailed up the river, and is busily firing the city and killing and raping its inhabitants. The bridge across which the triumphal procession had crossed is broken; a makeshift crossing strains under the weight of soldiers and refugees. Columns are broken, fire breaks from the upper floors of a palace on the river bank. In the foreground a statue of some venerable hero (posed like the Borghese Warrior) stands headless, still striding forward into the uncertain future. In the waning light of late afternoon, the dead lie where they fell, in fountains and atop the monuments built to celebrate the affluence of the now fallen civilization. The scene is perhaps suggested by the Vandal sack of Rome in 455.

Source

Thomas Cole, Prometheus Bound

Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Date: 1847
Technique: Oil on canvas, 1625.6 x 2438.4 mm

Thomas Cole, Expulsion from the Garden of Eden

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Date: 1828
Technique: Oil on canvas, 100.96 x 138.43 cm

Thomas Cole first exhibited Expulsion from the Garden of Eden along with his Garden of Eden (Amon Carter Museum) in 1828 at the National Academy of Design, of which he had been a founding member. Writing to his patron Robert Gilmore, Cole noted that his submissions aimed for a higher form of landscape painting. Although the works failed to sell, Gilmore supported Cole's travels abroad and set him on his way to receiving a major commission from New York art patron Luman Reed to paint a series of five monumental canvases depicting the Course of Empire (1836, New-York Historical Society).

Immigrating to the United States from England at the age of eighteen, Cole was likely inspired by contemporary British art when he conceived his scene of the Expulsion. He had relied upon British drawing books and prints for the rudiments of his artistic education, and his scene of Adam and Eve dwarfed by promontories of terrifying proportions recalls British painter and printmaker John Martin's illustrations for John Milton's Paradise Lost, which was popular on both sides of the Atlantic. Cole's dramatic use of light streaming through the rocky portal to Paradise is clearly reminiscent of Martin's history paintings.

In his 1835 Essay on American Scenery, Cole would describe the beauties of the American wilderness and its capacity to reveal God's creation as a metaphoric Eden. He considered European scenery to reflect the ravages of civilization, for which extensive forests had been felled, rugged mountains had been smoothed, and impetuous rivers had been turned from their courses. In contrast, Cole believed the American wilderness to embody a state of divine grace and lamented that the signs of progress were rapidly encroaching. In his Expulsion, Cole vividly portrays both Paradise and a hostile world replete with the consequences of earthly knowledge. These opposing realms meet near the center of the canvas. The profusion of flora and fauna evokes the beauty and harmony of Eden. Outside the gate to Paradise, Adam and Eve are cast into an abyss marked by blasted trees, desolate rocks, and an ominous wolf.

Source

Thomas Cole, The Titan's Goblet

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Date: 1833
Technique: Oil on canvas, 49.2 x 41 cm

The culmination of Cole's romantic fantasies, this work echoes the artist's other works of the period in its Italian derived scenery and its attempt to illustrate themes dealing with the grandeur of the past, the passage of time, and the encroachment of nature. Rejected by Cole's patron, Luman Reed, and subsequently owned by the artist John M. Falconer, the work defies full explanation. The massive, vegetation encrusted goblet around whose rim are found classical ruins, and on whose glassy surface boats sail, has been linked to Norse legend and Greek mythology. Theophilus Stringfellow, Jr. described it as a self-contained, microcosmic human world in the midst of vast nature, while Falconer linked the monumental stem of the goblet to the trunk of the Norse world-tree; he likened the cup to "the ramifying branches . . . which spread out and hold between them an ocean dotted with sails, surrounded by dense forests and plains." Other theories tie the fantastic forms to J. M. W. Turner's "Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus" (National Gallery, London), to Italian architecture and geological formations, or to the golden goblet of the sun-god Helios. The elevation and remove of the cup, rimmed with classical remnants, suggests the disassociation of the present, embodied in the surrounding landscape, from the pinnacle of creation which nourished its culture. Cole serves as intermediary, a role open only to the artist or poet, transcending the strictues of the immediate world to unite past and present.

Source

Thomas Cole, Expulsion - Moon and Firelight

Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Date: c. 1828
Technique: Oil on canvas, 91.3 x 121.9 cm