The Course of Empire is a series of five paintings created by Thomas Cole in the years 1833–1836. 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 Course of Empire is a series of five paintings created by Thomas Cole in the years 1833–1836.
Thomas Cole believed landscape paintings could impart moral and religious values. Although he achieved considerable success from his straightforward depictions of American scenery, his greater ambition was to convey the word of God through sublime landscapes.
He focused his story by painting the unfolding life of one man, as opposed to the complicated rise and fall of a nation. To further his interpretation of the series’ symbolic imagery, Cole wrote explanatory texts to accompany each painting. The texts effectively served as a reading companion for the viewers.
The Course of Empire (paintings) The theme of cycles is one that Cole returned to frequently, such as in his The Voyage of Life series. The Course of Empire comprises the following works: The Course of Empire – The Savage State; The Arcadian or Pastoral State; The Consummation of Empire; Destruction; and Desolation.
A series of pictures might be painted that should illustrate the History of a natural scene, as well as be an Epitome of Man—showing the natural changes of Landscape & those effected by man in his progress from Barbarism to Civilization, to Luxury, the Vicious state or state of destruction and to the state of Ruin & ...
About this artwork Cole expressed concern about the environmental impact of voracious industrialism, but at the same time his painting erased the human devastation wrought by colonialism and conquest in the region, which encompassed Attiwonderonk, Haudenosaunee, and Wenrohronon lands.
The Consummation of EmpireA detail in the lower right of the third painting in the series, "The Consummation of Empire", shows two children, maybe brothers, fighting, one clad in red and the other in green - the colours of banners of the two contending forces in "Destruction," which thus might depict a foreshadowed civil war.
Thomas Cole inspired the generation of American landscape painters that came to be known as the Hudson River School.
Cole designed these paintings to be displayed prominently in the picture gallery on the third floor of the mansion of his patron, Luman Reed, at 13 Greenwich Street, New York City.
There are two distinctive cities. Niagara Falls Ontario, Canada and Niagara Falls New York, United States of America.
Thomas ColeThe Course of Empire - Destruction / ArtistThomas Cole was an English-American painter known for his landscape and history paintings. He is regarded as the founder of the Hudson River School, an American art movement that flourished in the mid-19th century. Cole's work is known for its romantic portrayal of the American wilderness. Wikipedia
Thomas Cole | The Course of Empire: The Consummation of Empire | American | The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Thomas Cole was an English-brought into the world American painter known for his landscape and history paintings. One of the major nineteenth-century American painters, he is viewed as the originator of the Hudson River School, an American art development that flourished in the mid-nineteenth century.
Hudson River SchoolThomas Cole / PeriodThe Hudson River School was a mid-19th century American art movement embodied by a group of landscape painters whose aesthetic vision was influenced by Romanticism. The paintings typically depict the Hudson River Valley and the surrounding area, including the Catskill, Adirondack, and White Mountains. Wikipedia
In Romantic art, nature—with its uncontrollable power, unpredictability, and potential for cataclysmic extremes—offered an alternative to the ordered world of Enlightenment thought. The violent and terrifying images of nature conjured by Romantic artists recall the eighteenth-century aesthetic of the Sublime.
A key painting in Cole's oeuvre, and arguably his best-known work, The Oxbow was created at a time when Cole was largely occupied with his Course of Empire series; his patron Luman Reed had advised him to take a break from that series, as Cole seemed to be showing signs of depression, and to return to the genre of ...
Art as Ideas: Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire. Art as Ideas: Thomas Cole’s. The Course of Empire. For his stunning depictions of social and political theory, “Thomas Cole stands as one of the most influential fine artists in the history of liberal thought.”. The New York of 1836 was already well along its way to wresting national political ...
Thomas Cole’s importance and influence as an American artist exploded during the mid‐1830s and his career flourished in the early 1840s. He deeply influenced his immediate peers and successive generations of American artists. He transformed the landscape genre from a reflective art to a medium of expressing historical, social, and political theory. In a speech to the American Art Union, Joel Headley once implored his audience: “Give me the control of the art of a country, and you may have the management of its administration…The tariff, internal improvements, banks, political speeches and party measures…all together do not so educate the soul of the nation.” By producing titanic icons of classical liberal, romantic, locofoco historical and social theory, Thomas Cole stands as one of the most influential fine artists in the history of liberal thought.
Through depictions of the land, artists like Cole juxtaposed Man’s constant transience and restless pursuits against the relatively constant state of the natural world. As such, landscapes provided artists an opportunity to advance their own visions of spiritual life, ethics, politics ; they were able to present their own theories of psychological, social, and historical development. Few places on the planet could provide the level of daily evidence of revolutionary change than Cole’s own New York City in the 1830s. The emergent de facto national capital buzzed with locofoco radicalism, incipient concepts of “Manifest Destiny,” and a heady atmosphere of constant and bewildering technological and economic progress.
The New York of 1836 was already well along its way to wresting national political and cultural preeminence from Boston, widely recognized at the time as the nation’s heartland, the “Cradle of Liberty.” Throughout the Jacksonian period, propelled by the generation of whiggish, conservative, antiquarian “Knickerbocker” writers like Washington Irving and continuing through a new generation of artists and intellectuals calling themselves the “Young Americans,” New York assumed the position as the cultural capital of the United States. As historian Perry Miller argued in his justly famous The Raven and the Whale (1956), publisher and literati Evert Duyckinck’s literary circle, “The Tetractys Group,” purposively created the Young America movement in the mid‐1830s with the specific goal of birthing an authentically American national culture.
For the second piece in the series, Cole shifts the tone of color from dark, brooding, and lonely, to light, effervescent, and hopeful. Closely resembling Homeric Greece, the Arcadian or Pastoral State of civilization has tamed the savage wilderness, exercised man’s own faculties for power, and in turn lessened man’s enjoyment of perfect liberty. Having come far from chasing a single deer through an endless forest, man now herds his own small flocks of animals, cultivates small gardens, and even improves his environment by constructing roads, boats, clothing, simple farming implements, and what appears to be a small town of wooden houses. Most obviously, our subject civilization has introduced social hierarchies along with increasing amounts of power and wealth. In the center stands a lone temple, built of great stone slabs, the smoke of recent offerings pouring from the rooftop. All of man’s creations–his exercises of power over nature–remain, however, well below the heights of the rocky mountaintop. In fact, yet another mountain, even more towering and imposing than the last, has appeared in the farthest reaches of the background as if to remind the viewer that the subject society remains extremely young in comparison to Nature’s timelessness.
The confluence, therefore, of New York Knickerbockerism and Locofocoism, more than any other factor, launched Young America as a full‐fledged, generational movement of its own. Fine artist Thomas Cole’s work stands as the best visual representations of the ideas and the romantic fury which drove Young Americans.
Born in Lancashire, Britain in 1801, the young Cole spent short periods in Philadelphia and Ohio, before he permanently settled in New York City. To supplement his family’s meager income, Thomas taught himself to paint landscapes, quickly excelled at his new craft, and caught the attentions of wealthy New York patrons.
No. 2. — The Simple or Arcadian State, represents the scene after ages have passed. The gradual advancement of society has wrought a change in its aspect. The ‘untracked and rude’ has been tamed and softened. Shepherds are tending their flocks; the ploughman, with his oxen, is upturning the soil, and Commerce begins to stretch her wings.
In the picture No. 3, we suppose other ages have passed, and the rude village has become a magnificent city. The part seen occupies both sides of the bay, which the observer has now crossed. It has been converted into a capacious harbor, at whose entrance, toward the sea, stand two phari.
No. 4.— The picture represents the Vicious State, or State of Destruction. Ages may have passed since the scene of glory — though the decline of nations is generally more rapid than their rise. Luxury has weakened and debased. A savage enemy has entered the city. A fierce tempest is raging. Walls and colonnades have been thrown down.
The fifth picture is the scene of Desolation. The sun has just set, the moon ascends the twilight sky over the ocean, near the place where the sun rose in the first picture. Day-light fades away, and the shades of evening steal over the shattered and ivy-grown ruins of that once proud city.
All of those influences led Cole to paint his epic series as a warning to American society about the trappings of empire, conquest, and domination. Using his own words from time ...
Cole also felt the perishability of man’s works when he traveled in Europe and saw firsthand the ruins of the Roman Empire. There, sitting among the broken columns, he meditated on man’s works, ambitions, and the course of the future.
At the same time, artistically, he wanted to raise landscape painting to the stature that history painting enjoyed.
From Robb Bomboy: Thomas Cole, America’s premier landscape painter of the 1820’s and 1830’s, constructed the idea for his series, The Course of Empire, from a variety of influences.
The Course of Empire: Thomas Cole’s Warning to America. April 24, 2021. April 24, 2021 . renegade. When I had some free time in college I would visit our art museum, where a few of Thomas Cole’s paintings were displayed. They were really quite magnificent to behold in person.
A direct source of literary inspiration for The Course of Empirepaintings is Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage(1812–18). Cole quoted lines from Canto IV in his newspaper advertisements for the series:
The Course of Empireis a five-part series of paintings created by Thomas Colein the years 1833–36. It is notable in part for reflecting popular American sentiments of the times, when many saw pastoralismas 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 Lifeseries. All the paintings are 39.5 inches by 63.5 inches (100 cm by 161 cm) except The Consummation of Empirewhich is 51" by 76" (130 cm by 193 cm).
In the second painting, The Arcadianor Pastoral State, the sky has cleared and we are in the fresh morning of a day in spring or summer. The viewpoint has shifted further down the river, as the crag with the boulder is now on the left-hand side of the painting; a forked peak can be seen in the distance beyond it. Much of the wilderness has given way to settled lands, with plowed fields and lawns visible. Various activities go on in the background: plowing, boat-building, herding sheep, dancing; in the foreground, an old man sketches what may be a geometrical problem with a stick. On a bluff on the near side of the river, a megalithictemple has been built, and smoke (presumably from sacrifices) arises from it. The images reflect an idealized, pre-urban ancient Greece. This work shows humanity at peace with nature. The environment has been altered, but not so much so that it or its inhabitants are in danger.
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.
The fifth painting, Desolation, shows the results, years later. We view the remains of the city in the livid light of a dying day. The landscape has begun to return to wilderness, and no human beings are to be seen; but the remnants of their architecture emerge from beneath a mantle of trees, ivy, and other overgrowth. The broken stumps of the pharoses loom in the background. The arches of the shattered bridge, and the columns of the temple are still visible; a single column looms in the foreground, now a nesting place for birds. The sunrise of the first painting is mirrored here by a moonrise, a pale light reflecting in the ruin-choked river while the standing pillar reflects the last rays of sunset. This gloomy picture suggests all empires could be after their fall. It is a harsh possible future in which humanity has been destroyed by its own hands.
Perhaps that’s because we, as human beings, are inclined to tell ourselves: “yes, that may have happened to the Romans… but, not us.” This final painting is more beautiful than a natural landscape because it bares the mark of man. And, though the painting is devoid of human life, the presence of natural life, namely the plants and birds, seem almost an allusion to the reference that it will be the meek whom inherit the Earth.
Thomas Cole ‘s The Course of Empire is an epic five piece telling of the rise and fall of Rome. The paintings proceed as such: The Savage State, The Arcadian or Pastoral State, The Consummation of Empire, Destruction, and Desolation. If you’re a New Yorker, you’re in luck! You can see The Course of Empire series live at The New York Historical Society.
The thing I love most about The Course of Empire series is that each painting works as an individual whole, but also as a functioning part within the series. It’s not quite “a movie” but the progression feels inherently cinematic — almost like a story in five acts.
Reynolda House Museum of American Art. Information about Thomas Cole can be found in the Thomas Cole Collection, which contains correspondence, financial and legal documents, clippings, exhibition catalogs, poems related to him and his family, in the Albany Institute of History & Art Library.
After 1827 Cole maintained a studio at the farm called Cedar Grove, in the town of Catskill, New York. He painted a significant portion of his work in this studio. In 1836, he married Maria Bartow of Catskill, a niece of the owner's, and became a year-round resident. Thomas and Maria had five children. Cole's daughter Emily was a botanical artist who worked in watercolor and painted porcelain. Cole's sister, Sarah Cole, was also a landscape painter; the two were close.
Thomas and Maria had five children. Cole's daughter Emily was a botanical artist who worked in watercolor and painted porcelain. Cole's sister, Sarah Cole, was also a landscape painter; the two were close.
The most famous of these are the five- part series, The Course of Empire, which depict the same landscape over generations—from a near state of nature to consummation of empire, and then decline and desolation—now in the collection of the New-York Historical Society and the four-part The Voyage of Life.
Cole influenced his peers in the art movement later termed the Hudson River School, especially Asher B. Durand and Frederic Edwin Church . Church studied with Cole from 1844 to 1846, where he learned Cole's technique of sketching from nature and later developing an idealized, finished composition; Cole's influence is particularly notable in Church's early paintings. Cole spent the years 1829 to 1832 and 1841 to 1842 abroad, mainly in England and Italy.
Thomas Cole believed landscape paintings could impart moral and religious values. Although he achieved considerable success from his straightforward depictions of American scenery, his greater ambition was to convey the word of God through sublime landscapes. Cole’s four-part allegorical series, The Voyage of Life, ...
In contrast to the Course of Empire ’s grand, panoramic scenes of nature and architecture, flush with details and incidents, Cole painted The Voyage of Life in a simplified style. He focused his story by painting the unfolding life ...
Cole actually painted two versions of the Voyage of Life. After the first set was restricted from public view by the owners, Cole painted a duplicate set, which he exhibited from 1843–1844 in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and other cities. The second set, owned by the National Gallery of Art, received much acclaim after James Smillie produced ...
But with his ambition to paint a “higher style of landscape” to communicate his beliefs and values, Cole began painting large allegorical works, such as the five-canvas series Course of Empire (New-York Historical Society).
In the series’ last painting, “Old Age,” the stream of life has reached the ocean of eternity where the voyager floats aboard his broken, weathered vessel. All signs of nature and “corporeal existence” are cast aside.
He focused his story by painting the unfolding life of one man, as opposed to the complicated rise and fall of a nation. To further his interpretation of the series’ symbolic imagery, Cole wrote explanatory texts to accompany each painting. The texts effectively served as a reading companion for the viewers.
Cole’s influence on the course of American landscape painting was profound and his works influenced numerous younger painters who matured in the late 1840s and early 1850s, most notably Jasper F. Cropsey and Frederic Edwin Church.