Expulsion from the Garden of Eden

Thomas Cole split this canvas straight down the middle, and the two halves could not be more different. On the right, feathery palms and green slopes glow under warm light, a paradise still humming along without its tenants. On the left, everything has gone wrong: a blasted tree claws at the air, a volcano smokes in the distance, and a wolf tears at a fallen deer while a vulture waits nearby. Between the two worlds, a natural stone arch spans a chasm, and a blaze of light pours through it. Walk your eye along that bridge and you will find Adam and Eve, painted so small they are easy to miss, stumbling out of one life and into another.

Cole finished this in 1828, when he was still in his twenties and had just become the most talked about landscape painter in America. He is usually credited as the founder of the Hudson River School, the group that made American scenery a serious subject for art, but his real ambition was moral storytelling on a grand scale. He had been reading Milton's Paradise Lost and studying the dramatic prints of British artist John Martin, and that theatrical lighting shows. The painting had a companion piece, a sunny view of Eden itself, so visitors in Cole's day would have seen paradise and its loss hanging side by side. Shrinking the two figures almost to nothing was a deliberate choice: the real subject is the landscape, and what it feels like when nature turns from host to adversary.