Dream of Arcadia

Thomas Cole painted this imagined paradise in 1838, filling it with everything the ancient poets promised about Arcadia: shepherds with their flocks, a ring of dancers in white, pipers under the trees, and a Greek temple perched on a rocky hill above a stone bridge. On the left, barely visible in the shadow of those enormous trees, stands a herm of Pan, the goat legged god of the woods, with small figures bringing offerings to him. Cole packs the scene with life, but he keeps the people tiny. The trees, the waterfall tumbling down the cliff on the right, and that spiky mountain peak in the distance are the real subject.

Cole is usually called the founder of the Hudson River School, the first distinctly American group of landscape painters, and he is best known for sweeping views of the Catskills and the Connecticut River valley. This is a different kind of picture. After traveling through Italy in the early 1830s, he began painting invented classical worlds, including his famous five part series The Course of Empire, which traces a civilization from wilderness to ruin. Arcadia was his version of the good ending, a place where people live alongside nature instead of flattening it. He was watching American forests fall to axes and railroads at the time, and the painting reads a little like wishful thinking, which the title admits outright. It is a dream, not a place.