A magnificent classical city goes up in flames: invaders storm the bridge, warships burn in the harbour, women are seized, and a headless colossus still lunges forward amid the ruins. This is the fourth of Thomas Cole's five-part Course of Empire, showing the moment a civilisation falls — and a warning to the young United States.
Key facts
- Artist
- Thomas Cole1801–1848 · American
- Date
- 1836
- Period
- Romanticism1790–1850
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 99.7 × 161.3 cm
- Location
- New-York Historical Society New York, United States
Actual size
Compared with an adult 170 cm tall
Palette
#30230C#4C3A1D#645233#938464#7B6A4BBackground
The Course of Empire was commissioned by the New York merchant Luman Reed. Its five canvases show the same river valley across the ages: The Savage State, The Arcadian or Pastoral State, The Consummation of Empire, Destruction and Desolation. The same crag topped by a boulder appears in the distance of each, reminding us that this is one place.
Cole drew on Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage: “First Freedom, and then Glory — when that fails, Wealth, Vice, Corruption — barbarism at last.” Reed died before the series was finished; when it was shown in New York in 1836 it was a great success.
The series later entered the New-York Historical Society. Many scholars read it as a veiled comment on the expansionism and populist politics of Andrew Jackson's America, warning that the republic could follow Rome's path.
Technique & composition
A diagonal divides the picture: at the right, and ; at the left, the churning harbour and . at the centre is the focus of the fighting, with invaders pouring across.
Cole painted hundreds of figures and buildings in fine detail, yet unified the whole with and firelight. Smoke, flame and lightning give the scene tremendous movement — a rare epic history painting in American art.
Details
Symbolism
The headless hero
The colossus once honoured an imperial hero; now its head has been knocked off, though it still strikes a charging pose. It symbolises imperial glory that has lost its mind and direction, reduced to an empty gesture.
The cycle of violence
and the corpses by the bridge echo the Roman legend of the Rape of the Sabine Women: an empire founded in violence ends in violence.
Stories
- Did you know?
, dazzling in the previous picture, The Consummation of Empire, is here engulfed by war; in the last, Desolation, only a vine-covered column remains. Only seeing all five together reveals the whole story Cole tells.
- Did you know?
wear assorted armour and belong to no identifiable people. Cole deliberately left the enemy unnamed so that the story could apply to any empire.
Legacy
The Course of Empire is one of the earliest and most ambitious allegorical series in American art, proving that landscape could carry historical and moral reflection. It deeply influenced the and is still invoked in discussions of the rise and fall of empires and the fragility of civilisation.
