Expulsion, Moon and Firelight

Thomas Cole painted this around 1828, and it is essentially his "Expulsion from the Garden of Eden" with the people taken out. In the larger version, now in Boston, Adam and Eve stumble across a rock bridge away from paradise. Here the bridge, the gorge, the waterfall and the blasted tree are all still in place, but the stage is empty. What remains is a landscape doing the storytelling by itself: a blood red moon smoldering through the clouds on the left, a column of fire burning inside a cleft of rock on the right, and far off at the edge of the canvas a strip of warm, green, sunlit country that feels impossibly out of reach.

Cole was English born, arrived in America as a teenager, and went on to found what we now call the Hudson River School. He was never content to simply record scenery. He wanted his mountains and storms to carry moral weight, which is why his best known works are multi part sermons like The Course of Empire and The Voyage of Life. The fire here stands in for the flaming sword that guards the gate of Eden, and the dead tree in the foreground, with its roots clawing at bare rock, makes the point rather bluntly.

The painting is darker than most reproductions suggest, and much of the detail only emerges after your eyes adjust. Follow the thin thread of the waterfall as it drops under the natural arch and keeps falling into blackness below. That plunge, more than the fire or the moon, is what gives the scene its sense of no going back.