One of the reasons most art writing is not worth reading—and there are several reasons—is the irritating habit of critics of personalizing their subject and making it all about themselves. It goes without saying that this tendency is to be strenuously resisted, if not punished, but I am about to engage in a bit of it myself. For I feel I have a special relation to the subject of this article, Thomas Cole, the foremost American landscape painter of the first half of the 19th century and the focus of a new show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Like most critics, I usually write on art that I have come to know as an adult. But I first encountered Cole’s masterpiece, The Course of Empire series, when I was 7 years old. This series of five canvases (1833-1836), which is a major focus of the Met show, usually hangs in the New-York Historical Society, a few blocks from where I grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. And the central painting in the series, slightly larger than the others, is perhaps the first work of art I ever loved.
The Course of Empire charts the progress of an unspecified nation (although the United States is clearly intended) from its primitive inception to its glorious apogee and ultimate decline. Each painting depicts the same place (as indicated by the constant presence of a cliff in the background) but profoundly altered by each wave of human society that passes through. A different time of day appears in each work, from dawn as it rises over the first primordial landscape to the serene dusk that descends on the ruins of the final work, devastated by the barbarian invasions depicted in the preceding canvas.
I have been returning to these five paintings at various points throughout my life, and in the course of that encounter, my responses have changed many times. Nothing, it turns out, is more mutable than a painting. Each time we stand before it, the painting becomes, to some degree, a different work of art. My earliest response was perhaps the most interesting. Being at an age when one is apt to feel things with a greater vividness and force than is usually granted to adults, I thought that the central painting was the finest work of art I had ever seen. Of course, that may not have been far from the literal truth, since, like most 7-year-olds, I had not seen much. But I distinctly recall being astonished by what seemed, in the central painting, to be Cole’s superhuman virtuosity in depicting the empire at its zenith. Here pure, radiant sunlight floods the pristine marble façades of Roman temples massed in almost inconceivable density. The multitudinous crowds rejoice, and the painting itself is a testament to joy.
In my twenties, however, when I knew a bit more about art, this painting appeared somewhat diminished. I still admired its hyperbolic happiness, but I was more aware of the dryness of the drawing and the sketchiness of the figures in the landscape. I far preferred the final painting in the cycle, whose majestic composition is dominated by a shattered column on the left, rising over a devastated landscape that has been reclaimed by nature. Revisiting that final painting in the context of the present exhibition, I was once again struck by the magisterial authority of its composition—the best that Cole ever devised—but I was also aware, for the first time, that the column in the foreground was drawn somewhat weakly, especially in the garbled rendering of its Corinthian capital.
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Quite aside from this changefulness in our response to art, each exhibition seeks to alter, rather than simply to ratify, our sense of what we are seeing. It does this either by introducing us to new art or by offering a new perspective on art we already know. In the case of this exhibition, the curators present us with a reading of Thomas Cole that is radically contextualized. He is a creature, and a far-sighted critic, of the first phase of the Industrial Revolution. Born in the manufacturing town of Bolton le Moors in Lancashire, England, in 1801, Cole lived there until his father—after failing at various business ventures—moved the family to the United States in 1818. In this context, two of Cole’s most famous projects, the Course of Empire series and The Oxbow (also on view at the Met) can be seen as critiques of industrialism. Painted after one of several trips to England and the Continent—hence the title of the exhibition: Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings—they are a response to the America that confronted him after several years abroad, an America that was governed by Andrew Jackson and had begun to turn away from the land itself. This was a matter of great concern to the artist. When, in 1825, he first encountered the Hudson River valley, with which he would be forever after associated, he was immediately enchanted. “Nature,” he wrote, “has shed over this land beauty and magnificence, and although the character of its scenery may differ from the old world’s . . . still it has features, and glorious ones, unknown to Europe.” But even in a work as serene as The Oxbow, a work that superficially seems to celebrate the land, the curators usefully draw our attention to a tiny detail in the distance: It looks like wisps of clouds, but is really smoke rising from fires that are deforesting the area in preparation for its development and exploitation.
The Met exhibition is also effective in framing its subject in the context of American, British, and continental art in the early 19th century. Artists like Turner and Constable, both included in the present show, influenced Cole through their responses to industrialization. Whereas Constable turned his back on it, Turner, like the Impressionists half a century later, could glimpse something of poetry and beauty in these modern intrusions. As for Thomas Cole, he took a different tack: He looked industrialization in the eye, then countered it, and finally retreated into the purity of nature.
Although the Metropolitan exhibition is not a retrospective, it manages to cover each period of Cole’s career with an abundance of contemporary documentation, including the artist’s notebooks and palettes. As a result, Cole emerges as a more interesting and varied artist than some of us may have appreciated. Even though he was largely self-taught, as were most American painters of his day, he had an early and instinctive grasp of the Grand Manner that most of his compatriots lacked. As he matured and as his voyages resulted in a deeper familiarity with the art of England, France, and Italy, the last traces of provincialism evaporated from his paintings. By his untimely death in 1848, he had mastered many of the most advanced lessons in the art of his time. It is true that his draftsmanship was never exemplary—as I now appreciate—and he could succumb to the pietistic moralizing of his Voyage of Life series, which is not included in the present show. At the same time, however, he could paint a work like View of Florence from San Miniato (1837), which is—to me at least—one of the revelations of the Met’s show. Marked by a supreme sense of competence and self-confidence, it possesses a subtler and more subdued quality than many of Cole’s other works. This quality not only is the fruit of full maturity, but it may also demand of the viewer an equal maturity to perceive it at all.
James Gardner is completing The Louvre: A History, to be published by Grove Atlantic in 2019.
